Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

Series Editors: Varun Uberoi, Brunel University, UK; Nasar Meer, University of
Strathclyde, UK; and Tariq Modood, University of Bristol, UK

The politics of identity and citizenship has assumed increasing importance as

our polities have become significantly more culturally, ethnically and religiously
diverse. Different types of scholars, including philosophers, sociologists, political
scientists, and historians make contributions to this field and this series show-
cases a variety of innovative contributions to it. Focusing on a range of different
countries, and utilizing the insights of different disciplines, the series helps to
illuminate an increasingly controversial area of research, and titles in it will be of
interest to a number of audiences including scholars, students, and other inter-
ested individuals.

Titles include:
Parveen Akhtar
BRITISH MUSLIM POLITICS
Examining Pakistani Biraderi Networks
Heidi Armbruster and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof (editors)
NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURAL EUROPE
Borders, Networks, Neighbourhoods
Peter Balint and Sophie Guérard de Latour
LIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM AND THE FAIR TERMS OF INTEGRATION
Fazila Bhimji
BRITISH ASIAN MUSLIM WOMEN, MULTIPLE SPATIALITIES AND
COSMOPOLITANISM
Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw, and Eva Midden (editors)
TRANSFORMATIONS OF RELIGION AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Postsecular Publics
Bridget Byrne
MAKING CITIZENS
Public Rituals, Celebrations and Contestations of Citizenship
Jan Dobbernack
THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL COHESION IN GERMANY, FRANCE AND THE
UNITED KINGDOM
Jan Dobbernack, and Tariq Modood (editors)
TOLERANCE, INTOLERANCE AND RESPECT
Hard to Accept?
Romain Garbaye and Pauline Schnapper (editors)
THE POLITICS OF ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN THE BRITISH ISLES
Nisha Kapoor, Virinder Kalra and James Rhodes (editors)
THE STATE OF RACE
Peter Kivisto, and Östen Wahlbeck (editors)
DEBATING MULTICULTURALISM IN THE NORDIC WELFARE STATES
Dina Kiwan (editor)
NATURALIZATION POLICIES, EDUCATION AND CITIZENSHIP
Multicultural and Multi-Nation Societies in International Perspective
Aleksandra Lewicki
SOCIAL JUSTICE THROUGH CITIZENSHIP?
The Politics of Muslim Integration in Germany and Great Britain
Aleksandra Maatsch
ETHNIC CITIZENSHIP REGIMES
Europeanization, Post-war Migration and Redressing Past Wrongs
Derek McGhee
SECURITY, CITIZENSHIP AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Shared Values in Uncertain Times
Tariq Modood and John Salt (editors)
GLOBAL MIGRATION, ETHNICITY AND BRITISHNESS
Nasar Meer
CITIZENSHIP, IDENTITY AND THE POLITICS OF MULTICULTURALISM
The Rise of Muslim Consciousness
Ganesh Nathan
SOCIAL FREEDOM IN A MULTICULTURAL STATE
Towards a Theory of Intercultural Justice
Therese O’Toole and Richard Gale
POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT AMONGST ETHNIC MINORITY YOUNG PEOPLE
Making a Difference
Momin Rahman
HOMOSEXUALITIES, MUSLIM CULTURES AND IDENTITIES
Michel Seymour (editor)
THE PLURAL STATES OF RECOGNITION
Katherine Smith
FAIRNESS, CLASS AND BELONGING IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLAND
Paul Thomas
YOUTH, MULTICULTURALISM AND COMMUNITY COHESION
Milton Vickerman
THE PROBLEM OF POST-RACIALISM
Eve Hepburn and Ricard Zapata-Barrero
THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION IN MULTI-LEVEL STATES
Governance and Political Parties

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Transformations of
Religion and the Public
Sphere
Postsecular Publics

Edited by

Rosi Braidotti
Professor and Director of the Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University,
The Netherlands

Bolette Blaagaard
Assistant Professor, Aalborg University, Denmark

Tobijn de Graauw
Manager Academic Programme, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

and

Eva Midden
Assistant Professor, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Editorial matter, selection and Introduction © Rosi Braidotti, Bolette
Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw and Eva Midden 2014
Remaining chapters © Respective authors 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-40113-7
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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First published 2014 by
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Transformations of religion and the public sphere : postsecular publics / Rosi
Braidotti, Professor and Director of the Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht
University, The Netherlands, Bolette Blaagaard, Assistant Professor, Aalborg
University, Denmark, Tobijn de Graauw, Manager Academic Programme,
Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Eva Midden, Assistant Professor,Utrecht
University, The Netherlands.
pages cm. (Palgrave politics of identity and citizenship series)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Europe – Religion – 21st century. 2. Postsecularism – Europe.
3. Secularism – Europe. I. Braidotti, Rosi, joint author.
BL695.T73 2014
200.94⬘09051—dc23 2014023292
Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Introductory Notes 1
Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw, and Eva Midden

1 Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe? 14

Tariq Modood

2 Reawakening Enlightenment? Contesting Religion and

Politics in European Public Discourse 35
Anders Berg-Sørensen

3 (Pro)claiming Tradition: The ‘Judeo-Christian’ Roots of

Dutch Society and the Rise of Conservative Nationalism 53
Ernst van den Hemel

4 Re-examining an Ethics of Citizenship in Postsecular Societies 77

Christoph Baumgartner

5 The Eradication of Transcendence 97

William Egginton
6 The Unprecedented Return of Saint Paul in Contemporary
Philosophy 115
Gregg Lambert

7 More Proof, If Proof Were Needed: Spectacles of Secular

Insistence, Multicultural Failure, and the Contemporary
Laundering of Racism 132
Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley

8 Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice: Postsecularism,

Postcolonialism, and Digital Culture 152
Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

9 Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular;

or How Real Is Real Estate? 175
Pamela Klassen

v
vi Contents

10 Religious Aspirations, Public Religion, and the Secularity of

Pluralism 195
Patrick Eisenlohr

11 Towards a More Inclusive Feminism: Defining Feminism

through Faith 210
Eva Midden

12 Blasphemous Feminist Art: Incarnate Politics of Identity in

Postsecular Perspective 228
Anne-Marie Korte

13 Conclusion: The Residual Spirituality in Critical Theory:

A Case for Affirmative Postsecular Politics 249
Rosi Braidotti

Index 273
Notes on Contributors

Christoph Baumgartner is Associate Professor of Ethics in the

Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University
in the Netherlands. Principal topics of his research and teaching are reli-
gion in the public sphere, freedom of religion and freedom of expres-
sion, citizenship, secularity and postsecularism, environmental ethics,
and ethical dimensions of climate change.

Anders Berg-Sørensen is Associate Professor at the Department of

Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds a
PhD in Political Theory. His dissertation was titled ‘Paradiso-Diaspora:
Reframing the Question of Religion in Politics’ (2004). He has researched
the democratic negotiations of religion and politics in European polit-
ical thinking and public culture and is currently associated with the
research project ‘Religious Citizens: Religious Affect and Varieties of
European Secularity’ focusing on the political thinking of secularism.
He is currently investigating the relationship between political ethics
and real politics with a special interest in political cynicism, among
other things, as part of the research project ‘Compromise: Democratic
Ideals and Real Politics’. He has recently published the book Contesting
Secularism: Comparative Perspectives (2013).

Bolette Blaagaard is Assistant Professor in Communications at Aalborg

University, Copenhagen. She works and has published in the intersec-
tional field of journalism and cultural studies. She is the co-editor of
Cosmopolitanism and the New News Media with Lilie Chouliaraki (2014),
After Cosmopolitanism with Rosi Braidotti and Patrick Hanafin (2013),
and Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives with Sandra Ponzanesi
(2012).

Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University

and Director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht. Her research
and writing engages feminist philosophy and cultural studies, post-
structuralism, and critical theory as well as epistemology and Deleuze
studies. Recent books include The Posthuman (2013), Nomadic Subjects:
Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (2011a),
and Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (2011b). For more infor-
mation, visit www.rosibraidotti.com.

vii
viii Notes on Contributors

Tobijn de Graauw is Manager of the academic programme at the

Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her
background is in political philosophy, and during her MA at Utrecht
University she specialized in global justice and human rights. Her
current projects and research interests include the postsecular, religion
in the public sphere, the cultural roots of citizenship, and the environ-
mental humanities.

Patrick Eisenlohr is Professor of Modern Indian Studies at the University

of Göttingen and Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University. He
obtained a PhD from the University of Chicago in 2001 and previ-
ously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis and New
York University. He is the author of Little India: Diaspora, Time and
Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius (2006) and has conducted
research on transnational Hindu and Muslim networks, language and
diaspora and the field of linguistic anthropology more generally, and
media technology in Mauritius and India. In his most recent research,
Patrick is interested in how media practices shape situations of ethnic
and religious diversity, and how they contribute to the non-deliberative
and everyday dimensions of citizenship.

William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities

and Vice Dean for Graduate Education at the Johns Hopkins University,
where he teaches courses on Spanish and Latin American literature,
early modern European literature and thought, literary theory, and the
relation between literature and philosophy. He is the author of How
the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle
in History (2006), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth
(2010), and In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011). His next book, The
Man Who Invented Fiction, is to be published in 2015.

Ernst van den Hemel is a research fellow at the Centre for the
Humanities, University Utrecht. His research focuses on the postsecular,
nationalism, and early-modern theology. He completed his PhD on John
Calvin’s Institutes at the University of Amsterdam in 2011. His publica-
tions include a monograph on Calvinism and the right to resistance
(2009), and a co-edited volume on the work of Alain Badiou (2012). He
is co-editor of the forthcoming edited volume Words: Religious Language
Matters (2014).

Pamela Klassen is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion

at the University of Toronto, and directs the Religion in the Public
Sphere Initiative. Her book Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and
 Notes on Contributors ix

Liberal Christianity (2011) won the 2012 American Academy of Religion

Award of Excellence for Analytical-Descriptive Studies. Her other publi-
cations include After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement co-ed-
ited with Courtney Bender (2010) and Blessed Events: Religion and Home
Birth in America (2001). For more information, see http://projects.chass.
utoronto.ca/pklassen/.

Anne-Marie Korte is Professor of Religion, Gender and Modernity in the

Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. She is also the Director of
the Netherlands School for Advanced Studies in Theology and Religion
(NOSTER). Her major research interests are classic and contemporary
miracle stories and the role of gender and sexuality in contemporary
accusations of blasphemy. Her latest publications include Everyday Life
and the Sacred: Re/configuring Gender Studies in Religion co-edited with
Angela Berlis and Kune Biezeveld (2014) and Contesting Religious Identities
co-edited with Bob Becking and Lucien van Liere (2014).

Gregg Lambert is Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and founding

Director of the Syracuse University Humanities Center in New York. He
has published extensively on contemporary issues of the humanities,
critical theory, and continental philosophy, especially on the philoso-
phies of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida.

Alana Lentin is an associate professor in Cultural and Social Analysis at

the University of Western Sydney. She is the co-author of The Crises of
Multiculturalism: Racism in a Neoliberal Age with Gavan Titley (2011), and
has also edited The Politics of Diversity in Europe (2008). Her other books
include Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe (2004) and Racism: A Beginner’s
Guide (2008).

Koen Leurs is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School

of Economics. He is the author of Digital Passages: How Diaspora, Gender
and Youth Culture Intersect Online (forthcoming 2015), co-editor of the
anthology Everyday Feminist Research Praxis (2014) as well as the special
issue on Digital Crossings in Europe published in Crossings. Journal of
Migration & Culture (2014). His research focuses on digital networks,
youth culture, multiculturalism, urbanity, migration, and gender. See
www.koenleurs.net.
Eva Midden is Assistant Professor in Gender Studies at the Media
and Culture Studies Department at Utrecht University (Netherlands).
She wrote her PhD thesis, ‘Feminism in Multicultural Societies’, at the
University of Central Lancashire (United Kingdom) and was recently
x Notes on Contributors

involved in the European Research Project ‘MIGNET’ for which she

conducted research on migration, gender, and religious practices in new
media. Her general research interests include feminist theory, postco-
lonial theory, intersectionality, postsecularism, whiteness, and media
analysis. Her latest publication is ‘Feminism and Cultural and Religious
Diversity in Opzij: An Analysis of the Dutch Feminist Magazine’ in the
European Journal of Women’s Studies.

Tariq Modood is Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy at

the University of Bristol and is also the founding Director of the Centre
for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship. He was awarded an MBE for
services to social sciences and ethnic relations in 2001 and was elected
a member of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2004. His latest books
include Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (2nd ed., 2013), Still Not Easy Being
British (2010), and as co-editor Secularism, Religion and Multicultural
Citizenship (2009; co-editor), Global Migration, Ethnicity and Britishness
(2011), European Multiculturalisms (2012), Tolerance, Intolerance and
Respect (2013), and Religion in a Liberal State (2013). His website is tariq-
modood.com.

Sandra Ponzanesi is Head of Humanities at University College Utrecht

and Associate Professor of Gender and Postcolonial Critique at the
Department of Media and Culture Studies/Gender Graduate Programme,
Utrecht University. She is the author of Paradoxes of Postcolonial Culture
(2004), The Postcolonial Cultural Industry (2014) and co-editor of Migrant
Cartographies (2005), Deconstructing Europe (2012), Postcolonial Cinema
Studies (2012), and editor of Gender, Globalization and Violence (2014).

Gavan Titley is Lecturer in Media Studies at the National University of

Ireland, Maynooth. He is the co-author of The Crises of Multiculturalism:
Racism in a Neoliberal Age with Alana Lentin (2011), and they have
also edited The Politics of Diversity in Europe (2008). Forthcoming books
include the edited National Conversations? Public Service Media and
Cultural Diversity (2014) and Hate Speech Online: Principles and Politics,
Platforms and Practices (2014).
Introductory Notes
Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw, and
Eva Midden

This collection of edited essays aims to explore the so-called ‘postsecular

condition’ from a variety of disciplinary angles and from different but
intersecting theoretical and political perspectives. Originally coined by
Jürgen Habermas, the term ‘postsecular’ has been adopted in a broad
range of intellectual and theoretical traditions and has gained wide-
spread currency. Of pivotal importance in this discourse is the ‘secu-
larization myth’, so prominent in the West, which has been questioned
by recent religious resurgence. This myth connects secularism with
progress and modernity on the back of religious backwardness (Jakobsen
and Pellegrini, 2008). Secularism is moreover counted among the ideol-
ogies that spell danger to democracy in Europe by not sufficiently recog-
nizing the importance of religious and multicultural identities and their
implications for active citizenship (Modood, 2007). The postsecular turn
seeks to provide a counter-discourse to the myth of secularism by devel-
oping a variety of critiques of the myth grounded in discussions on the
current political, social, and technological condition in which Europe,
in particular, and the Western world more generally, finds itself. What
the concept – the postsecular – means and stands for, however, is far
from clear. Even though much has been written recently on the postsec-
ular turn or condition, there is no agreement on how to conceptualize
the term and connect it to current developments in our societies.

Secularism by any other name

The starting position of this volume is to challenge, as all the contribu-

tors in this volume do, the consensus that seems to have emerged in the
European public discourse about the privileged link between Christianity
and secularism, or faith and reason. Canonized in the dialogue between

1
2 Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw, and Eva Midden

Jürgen Habermas and (then) Cardinal Ratzinger in 2004 (Habermas and

Ratzinger, 2005), this equation paves the road for a two-layered argu-
ment: the exceptional nature of the Christian religion in its relationship
to rational thought and therefore the continuity between Christianity
and secular critical thinking.
This Habermasian consensus, upheld also by Charles Taylor (2007)
among others, rests on the notion that secularism both as an institu-
tional practice – the separation of state from church – and as a phil-
osophical frame is a distillation of Judeo-Christian precepts, notably
respect for the law, for the intrinsic worth of the individual person, the
autonomy of the self, moral conscience, rationality, and the ethics of
love. These values are held by Habermas and Ratzinger as central also to
European identity and history and have allowed for the Enlightenment
and the ensuing scientific process which has made this continent so
important.
In other words, the Christian faith allows for rational thought, based
on a teleological or evolutionary vision of the future and on humanist
faith in human reason’s capacity to self-regulate and steer social progress.
This value system defines Humanism as both personal and civiliza-
tional ideal in terms of the respect for liberal individualism. It moreover
connects both Humanism and secularism to notions of equality and
democracy, which lie at the core of European modernity and the eman-
cipatory project of the Enlightenment. It could be argued, then, that the
value system of European secular Humanism is intrinsically religious,
albeit by opposition and negation. This is what Habermas has in mind
when he speaks of the spiritual roots of critical reason and of Western
philosophy in general. This line of reasoning leaves all other monothe-
istic religions, notably Islam, in the singular position of being de-linked
from rationality and hence incapable of engendering secularist distinc-
tions. By extension, religions like Islam would have no claim to moder-
nity, emancipation, or human rights. This, as Gellner (1992) and Talal
Asad (2003) noted, is not only far from unproblematic politically but
also historically false.
The Habermasian claim defines the postsecular turn in the narrowest
possible Eurocentric terms and it universalizes a specific brand and
historical manifestation of secularism, which is part of the reason why
we find it unacceptable. As William Connolly (1999) astutely remarked,
this strategy has passed off Western secular systems as achieving abso-
lute moral authority and the social status of a dominant norm.
There are, however, other objectionable aspects to that equation, in
that it contains an ambiguous relationship to the project of Western
 Introductory Notes 3

modernization and more specifically to its emancipatory politics.

Habermas’s position displayed clear signs of postsecular anxiety and it
expressed moral panic at the sight of the horrors of the clash of civi-
lizations, on the one hand, and the structural injustices of the global
economy, on the other (Borradori, 2003). Even more problematic for
Habermas and Ratzinger are the effects of contemporary biotechnolog-
ical advances. The future of human ‘nature’ has become the subject of
deep concern in the public debate of our globalized times. Habermas
coined the term ‘postsecular societies’ also in order to signal the urgency
of a critical and ethical reconsideration of the function of scientific
belief systems in the contemporary world. Fear of genetic manipula-
tions, which Habermas (2003) shares with champions of contemporary
liberalism like Fukuyama (2002), and a more anarchical-minded thinker
like Sloterdijk (2009), implicitly endorses one of the axioms of all mono-
theistic religions, namely the sacred nature of human life and procrea-
tion. This technophobic reaction to our biotechnological progress has
led to a return to Kantian moral universalism in critical theory, notably
through the work of Martha Nussbaum (1999, 2006), Seyla Benhabib
(2002), Nicholas Rose (2001), and others.
Several issues are conflated in this discussion: firstly, there is the
legacy of the Enlightenment and the Christian urge to uphold natural
law, in opposition to the ravages of technological modernity. Morality
becomes mobilized in defence of ‘Life’ and opposed to technological
manipulations. Secondly, the moral and political test case for this belief
is the legacy of secularism, which is linked to Christianity by negation.
Thirdly, there is the specific issue of the legal and social status of women
and LGBT people who have been, together with the anti-slavery and
de-colonization movements, the motors of emancipation in modernity
(Braidotti, 2008). Last but not least is the acknowledgement that some
of the most pertinent critiques of globalization and of advanced capi-
talism today and of the structural injustices of globalization are voiced
by religiously driven social movements. This tendency has intensified in
Christianity since the election of Pope Francis, voted ‘person of the year’
by Time magazine in December 2013.
Habermas’s postsecular argument, however, displays a topsy-turvy
sequence of internally contradictory claims that express deep anxieties
about secularism, faith, and the project of Western modernity. Much
as the contributors of this volume welcome the ethical aspirations that
support these claims, we do not share the Christian exceptionalism
of their premises nor the neo-universalism of their ethics. We advo-
cate critical distance both on theoretical and political grounds from
4 Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw, and Eva Midden

the ethnocentrism of this position and also the technophobic fear it

expresses (Braidotti, 2002, 2006). The Habermasian claims also mystify
the genuine historical achievements of Western emancipatory politics.
We would all be better off acknowledging instead that both the modern-
ization process and the emancipation of women and LGBTs are still very
much in process in the West and that racism and neo-imperialism are
alive and well on the world stage today. Consequently, no simplified
dichotomies should be set up between an allegedly progressive Christian
tradition and the allegedly backward others, starting with the Muslim.
The counter-consensus expressed in this volume is that the Western
secularization model may not be the only or the best one: multiple
modernities are actually at stake (Bracke, 2012; Eisenstadt, 2000;
Modood, 2007). Therefore, different forms of secularism may be engen-
dered by multiple models of modernity. This allows us to venture the
idea that the postsecular condition is diverse, multicultural, and inter-
nally differentiated and that no single analysis or blueprint should be
taken as the definitive and comprehensive one.

Aims

This volume, therefore, not only builds on the assumption that we need
to critique fixed notions of what secularism is but also seeks to bring
about the prefix ‘post’ as a sort of question mark that follows the subse-
quent central considerations: How does this postsecular critique throw
into relief notions of agency in political struggles linked to colonialism,
female emancipation, and racism? How does the postsecular challenge
existing schemes of political economies, and how may we map out the
power structures that make up the European scholarship on the intersec-
tion of race, gender, and religion in relation to the political reality of class
and social stratification of European societies today? In this context, we
would argue that the ‘post’ in postsecular does not refer to a condition
that could be characterized as ‘after’ secularism in a linear, temporal
dimension, but rather to a critical reflection of secularism. In order to
provide answers, this volume offers a selection of postsecular discourses
and practices through which it seeks to bring attention to the many
productive intersections between the political ideas and developments
of the postsecular and those in postcolonial and feminist discourse.
Thus, the volume frames the discussion on the postsecular with refer-
ence to the idea of globalization in general and more specifically on the
many productive intersections between the multiple practices and the
complex realities of diasporic conditions and discourse. By approaching
 Introductory Notes 5

the concept in this way, the volume targets specific problems faced by
contemporary Europe in terms of the political right-turn it is witnessing.
This turn is, for instance, evidenced in the European Parliamentary elec-
tion in 2009; the rise of neoconservative politics and the financial crisis;
and the crisis of multicultural policies in the wake of 9/11 are also para-
doxically an expression of the increasingly multicultural and religious
space of European nations nowadays. The postsecular condition chal-
lenges European political theory, in general, and multiculturalism and
feminism, in particular, because it questions the axiom that equates
secularism with emancipation. Recent political as well as intellectual
developments have seen sexual liberties be appropriated to European
national imaginaries. Homophobia and gender violence is represented
as belonging to radical Islam only, and thus the new imaginary plays
into the hands of the political right that pledge to reinforce the bounda-
ries between us and them – the secular and the religious. It is therefore
pivotal that the concept of the postsecular is challenging this binary
position, and that the myth of the modern secular individual versus the
backwards religious people is exposed. A postsecular approach makes
manifest the notion that agency, or political subjectivity, can actually
be conveyed through and supported by religious piety and may even
involve significant amounts of spirituality.
In terms of gender relations, the undoing of the secular myth has
two important corollaries – firstly, that we need to question the axio-
matic belief that women’s emancipation is directly indexed upon sexual
freedom, in keeping with the European liberal tradition of individual
rights and self-autonomy. This historically specific model cannot be
universalized and more sober accounts are needed of its contingent and
hence partial applicability. Most prominent among the questions left
unresolved by militant, idealized secularism are: ‘How does secularism
posit the relationship between equality and difference? And what are we
to make of the fact that, both logically and historically, one does not at
all guarantee the other?’ (Scott, 2007). The second corollary is that polit-
ical agency need not be critical in the negative sense of oppositional and
thus may not be aimed solely or primarily at the production of counter-
subjectivities. Subjectivity is rather a process ontology, which involves
complex and continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values
and hence also multiple forms of accountability (Braidotti, 1992, 2013).
Consequently, there exists a necessity to question the ‘idealized secular’,
or the ideology of secularism (Modood, 2007) and its political manipu-
lations by politicians and populists today (Connolly, 1999). This post-
secular paradox opens up spaces for new forms of reflection of religion
6 Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw, and Eva Midden

in the public sphere. The concept of the postsecular, thus, brings chal-
lenging new perspectives to the discussion about European identity and
culture in a globalized world.

The historical route to the postsecular

In order to fully explore the theoretical premises of the postsecular turn

it is necessary first to provide its historical background, which can be
divided into five overlapping and mutually enriching developments.
Firstly, the end of the Cold War has played a major role in the develop-
ment of the myth of secularism. The subsequent defeat of communism
led to the hegemony of a neoliberal discourse that promotes consum-
erist capitalism as the allegedly most evolved form of human devel-
opment. Secondly, economic and cultural globalization caused strong
movements of resistance in the form of resurgent nationalisms at the
macro as well as the micro levels. This led to a resurgence of civiliza-
tion discourses about Western traditional values which produce, once
again, hierarchies of identities, cultures, and even ethnic belongings.
In constant fear of the (cultural, ethnic) other, these developments also
provoked the rise of a perpetual state of ‘new’ wars against terror or
internal enemies. Finally, a pervasive state of technological mediation
has penetrated most aspects of social life, with the convergence between
information and biotechnologies as the core issue.
The historical defeat of communism has two major implications for
the debate on the postsecular: firstly, the role of the former Eastern
European churches – from the Orthodox to the Catholic under double
leadership of the Polish trade-union movement Solidarność and the
Polish-born Pope John Paul II in bringing down the iron curtain. This
alone shifts the balance of political power between church and state in
former Eastern Europe and contributes to a reappraisal of the political
relevance of religiously based activism. Secondly, it brings about serious
questioning of the militant atheism of the Marxist tradition. Resting
on Hegel’s philosophy of history, Karl Marx saw the dismissal of reli-
gion by dialectical reason’s unfolding upon human history as an inevi-
table aspect of human progress and emancipation. Nature and religion,
need and superstition are part of the oppressive legacy we need to leave
behind. Marx supports the working of reason against ‘the opium of the
masses’ as a necessary component of the political project of human
liberation. Simone de Beauvoir will follow suit.
After the downfall of communism, neoliberalism reinforced its oppor-
tunistic ideology that considers financial success as the sole indicator of
 Introductory Notes 7

the status of development of a society, including of its women. Economic

failure is accordingly perceived as a sign of underdevelopment and as a
lack of emancipation, as money and individual accumulation alone is
taken as the indicator of both freedom and progress. The global cele-
bration of the absolute value of profit as the motor of human and of
women’s progress implies that even the most basic social democratic
principle of solidarity is misconstrued as old-fashioned welfare support
and dismissed accordingly. And as the financial crises bring European
economies to their knees, the neofascist movements rise.
The emphasis on liberal individualism and capitalism makes neoliber-
alism profoundly ethnocentric: it takes the form of a contradictory and
ethnocentric position, which argues along civilization or ethnic lines
(Huntington, 1998). It is complicit with a neoliberal discourse about
white supremacy, namely that our women (Western, Christian, mostly
white, and raised in the tradition of secular Enlightenment) are already
liberated and thus do not need any more social incentives or eman-
cipatory policies. ‘Their women’, however, (non-Western, non-Chris-
tian, mostly not white, and alien to the Enlightenment tradition) are
still backwards and need to be targeted for special emancipatory social
actions or even more belligerent forms of enforced ‘liberation’. Hence
the bodies of women, as bearers of authentic ethnic identity, get both
sexualized and racialized within a neo-imperial discourse of triumphant
Western sovereignty. This simplistic and belligerent position, defended
by people as different as Cherie Blair in Britain and Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the
Netherlands, to name but a few, reinstates a world view based on colo-
nial lines of demarcation. It fails to see the great grey areas in between
the pretentious claim that feminism has unitary goals that have already
succeeded in the West and the equally false statement that feminism is
non-existent outside this geopolitical region.
One of the recent emblems of this situation is the burqa-clad bodies
of the Afghan women in defence of whom such an anti-abortionist,
conservative, and anti-feminist president as George W. Bush claimed to
launch one of his many commercially driven wars of conquest. What
cynic would believe the claim that the war was fought to help out the
poor oppressed masses of Islamic women? And yet, this is the political
discourse that circulates in the global economical world disorder: one in
which sexual difference defined as the specificity of women’s condition
is again the terrain on which power politics is postulated. The ‘new’ wars
of the third millennium are consequently also religious crusades, fought
on the principles stated in all the points mentioned above. The so-called
‘clash of civilizations’ pitches religious ‘fundamentalism’ as an Eastern
8 Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw, and Eva Midden

problem against secularism as the defining feature of the Western world

in a mutually exclusive confrontational discourse.
More complexity is needed in the debate about women’s self-determi-
nation and feminist agency, especially in view of the impact of technol-
ogies – both information and biogenetic – in the making of subjectivity
in our globally mediated world (Braidotti, 2006). The lessons imparted
by postcolonial and race studies on issues of identity formations and
othering are crucial to this discussion and their intersection with femi-
nist approaches absolutely necessary. While technologies may enhance
our ability to connect and form new relationships that in turn may
support active citizenship and a strong civil society, they are simulta-
neously enabling anonymous bullying and racial-centric, ethnocentric,
and misogynist networks to flourish (Levmore and Nussbaum, 2010).
On this score, the European dimension demands attention to which
the case of the Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik, testifies.
Breivik’s international, Islamophobic, online network calls into ques-
tion the political implication of international, online communities
as it ‘reveals a subculture of nationalistic and Islamophobic websites’
(Brown, 2011). In his infamous manifesto, Breivik linked extensively to
scholars on secularism, such as Samuel P. Huntington’s clashes of civili-
zations, and to politicians such as Dutch MP Geert Wilders and Ayaan
Hirsi Ali (featuring along with European political icons such as Winston
Churchill).
Large parts of the scholarship on secularism are related to the wave of
anti-Muslim intolerance that is sweeping across Europe today. This gives
rise to a tendency in public discussions on the postsecular condition to
concentrate almost exclusively on Islam, making it the most targeted
of monotheistic religions, although the case of Breivik has shed light
on the complexities of extremism. The focus on Islam accomplishes a
double reduction: firstly of the postsecular condition to exclusively reli-
gious principles and secondly of the postsecular condition itself to the
‘Muslim issue’. This reduction needs to be questioned, especially in a
context of a war on terror that results in the militarization of the social
space.
By extension this volume rests on the conviction that any unreflective
brand of normative secularism in Europe today runs the risk of complicity
with anti-Islam racism and xenophobia. The newly forged connection
between homosexual lifestyles and anti-Islam is, in particular, clear
in the developments of homo-nationalism, as seen in the example of
right-wing parties’ attachment to gay pride and the homosexual milieu
in larger European towns, such as in Copenhagen, Denmark. These
 Introductory Notes 9

developments dovetail the heated debates about freedom of expression

and other Western liberties, which are mounted as incorruptible and
indisputable ideas and qualities of European democracies and placed
in direct opposition to what is perceived as inherently violent and
gender segregating practices of Islam. What is needed, therefore, is a
more balanced kind of analysis and a more diversified approach that
not only includes all the monotheistic religions but also contextualizes
them within shifting global power relations and within more complex
social dynamics and problems.

Structure of the book

To Jürgen Habermas (2008), the term postsecular society could only

apply to affluent, westernized nations, because of the lapse of religious
ties in the post-war period. Challenging the secularization myth based in
the assumed link between modernity and secularism, Habermas argues
that secular citizens must acknowledge and accept religious influence
and this is particularly the case, because the identity of Western societies
is rooted in Judeo-Christian values (Habermas, 2008). The first contri-
butions on the political implications of the postsecular condition offer
three different analyses of how westernized, postsecular societies may
cope with their condition.
Tariq Modood approaches the topic of the postsecular by means of the
multicultural challenge. Rather than a performed identity or a reawak-
ened Enlightenment critique, the postsecular condition is a necessary
way of coping with the arrival and settlement of Muslims and there-
fore the change of social structures in Western European societies. This,
Modood argues, is perhaps a struggle for radical secularism; however, to
the ‘dominant version’ of political secularism this multicultural chal-
lenge is a resource.
Anders Berg-Sørensen finds the roots of the secularism myth in the
narrative of the European Enlightenment and bases his analyses on the
question of how the Enlightenment critique of religion has been reawak-
ened. This perspective draws Berg-Sørensen to connect firmly secularism
to democracy and to bring about an analysis of the implications of the
reawakening of religious sentiments in the public sphere. Drawing on
both the Enlightenment’s critique of religion and on critiques levelled
against secularism, he argues for shift in discourses from an unreflexive
critique of secularism towards a critical secularism.
Following on from Habermas’s argument, Ernst van den Hemel
in this volume argues that the postsecular identity may be seen as a
10 Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw, and Eva Midden

‘performative construction’, for which (neo)conservative politicians

in the Netherlands, in particular, have proven gifted. Van den Hemel
discusses how postsecular politics rest on a historical construction,
which is being enacted through reiterations of religious-cultural values
considered to be inherently secular.
Following the work of among others Saba Mahmood, Christoph
Baumgartner develops an understanding of ‘blasphemy’ as violence
that makes it possible to better understand the significance and the
kind of injury that many believers feel in view of ‘blasphemous’ acts
and artifacts they consider ‘blasphemous’ or profoundly offensive.
Liberal-secularist explanations of why believers feel injured in cases
such as the Muhammad cartoon controversy in Denmark do not suffice,
Baumgartner argues.
Not only do they not suffice, the liberal-secularist tradition may
be used for misconstruing the relationship between human freedom
and religious belief, argues William Egginton. Following on from the
seminal work on religious agency by Saba Mahmood (2005), Egginton
raises the critique of liberal-secular thought’s failure to grasp the extent
to which religious fundamentalism today may be inspired and fed not
by its attachment to an opposing tradition of thought but by the very
system of accumulation and exclusion necessitated by capitalism, and at
least in part defended by liberal thought.
In a close and complex reading of Alain Badiou’s critique of the
philosophy of Emmanuelle Levinas, Gregg Lambert explores phenom-
enological engagements with multiculturalism and neoliberalism. He
emphasizes especially the implications of these debates for new under-
standings of postsecular ethics.
The two following chapters bring together two highly important
aspects of the postsecular turn: the role of media in the discourses about
religion and secularism in Western societies, and the intersection of reli-
gion with other axes of identities, mainly ‘race’ and ethnicity. Lentin and
Titley focus on the association of religion with backwardness in popular
media and recent films such as Geert Wilders’s Fitna and Innocence of
Muslims. Leurs and Ponzanesi, on the other hand, show how digital
media provide ethnic and religious minorities with a space where they
can discuss their own experiences, develop their own interpretations of
Islam, and discuss how to live in a secular society.
Moreover, Lentin and Titley engage with the argument that ‘the
postsecular’ is often being reduced to the ‘Muslim issue’. They argue
that in order to widen the terrain of postsecular life, it is not enough to
struggle for a more inclusive public sphere; one also has to develop an
 Introductory Notes 11

understanding of the racialization of the debates about Islam in Europe.

The authors connect this racialization to multiculturalism in Europe
and discussions about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ diversity.
Leurs and Ponzanesi also counter the idea that the return of religion
is a ‘Muslim issue’ that challenges democracy, secularism, and progress.
They show that through digital practices, Moroccan-Dutch youth
manage to produce an Islam that is a cool affective marker, not an essen-
tialized category, and is connected in multiple ways to other aspects of
their identities (such as ethnicity, nationality, and class).
Klassen argues that even the First Nations in early twentieth century
were already postsecular. Despite this different evaluation of the post-
secular condition we are in, this author also investigates how reli-
gious communities with diverse mentalities relate to the secular. She
argues that in order to make a proper analysis of ‘postsecular publics’
in colonial context, one has to take into account the significance of
Christianity regarding norms of communication and comprehension.
She envisions that the postsecular could help to reimagine the clash
and mixture of mentalities and practices, giving more space to First
Nations.
Eisenlohr writes about religious pluralism and how secularism
manages this. Contrary to Klassen, the author argues that we have not
moved beyond secularism, as the considerable range of policies and
practices that are labelled as ‘secular’ show. He especially emphasizes the
importance of the concept in postcolonial contexts. Eisenlohr refers to
his fieldwork in India and Mauritius to show the relationship between
globalization, religious networks, and secularism.
Midden criticizes the use of a strict secularism/religion binary by some
feminists and starts from postsecular critique to develop a feminism
that accommodates differences in an affirmative manner. She brings the
debates about the postsecular turn together with her empirical research
among women in the Netherlands in order to discuss the possibilities of
such an inclusive feminism.
Korte, on the other hand, approaches the topic of gender in relation
to religion and secularism from a different angle. She starts from the
provocative performance of Madonna, staging a crucifixion scene during
her Confessions on a Dance Floor tour. She shows that it is not the fact that
Madonna, as a woman, stands in the place of Jesus Christ that makes it
a blasphemous act. It is rather, the particular details of the representa-
tion, such as its detached stance towards suffering, that make it prob-
lematic. Hence, just as Midden does, Korte deconstructs the rigorous
secularism/religion binary and the role of gender in it, but where Midden
12 Rosi Braidotti, Bolette Blaagaard, Tobijn de Graauw, and Eva Midden

focuses on the role of feminism, Korte’s account analyzes a show that

brings together the saint, the idol, and the icon in a remarkable way. This
way she manages to account for traditional readings of crucifixion scenes
and the role of women in them.
In her postface to the volume, Braidotti strikes an affirmative note by
exploring the residual spirituality of critical theory. She argues that this
non-theistic faith in the value of critique constitutes one of the main
aspects of the postsecular predicament. This is understood in the light
of vital materialism and feminist neo-materialism as leading to a reap-
praisal of the affective roots of the work of critique.
Thus the volume progresses from a political anatomy of the multi-
faceted crises of secularism in a European contest, through postcolo-
nial perspectives, into a more global reappraisal of the multiple ways in
which the ‘post’ of the postsecular functions. Next to the (too) many
reactive meanings of the term as indicating not only a return of religion
in the public sphere but also a belligerent and aggressive manipulation
of such a ‘return’ – the volume also points to some affirmative aspects of
the same phenomenon. These include ironical replays, subversive and
even blasphemous deconstructions, and open, political contestations of
a normative vision of the secular. In this respect, the ‘post’ in the post-
secular also marks a positive longing – as in ‘going after’ – a new, more
inclusive, social practice of the secular in the third millennium.

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Bracke, S. (2012). ‘Secularization Theories and Islam. How the Narrative of
“Pillarization” Frames Muslims and Refigures Dutch Identity in Times of
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1
Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’
in Western Europe?
Tariq Modood

By secularism or more specifically, political secularism, I mean institu-

tional arrangements such that religious authority and religious reasons
for action and political authority and political reasons for action are
distinguished; so, political authority does not rest on religious authority
and the latter does not dominate political authority. Support for such
arrangements can be derived from a religion or a religious authority,
and certainly are supported by many religious people.1 On this very
broad conception of political secularism, there is no necessary, absolute
separation of religion and political rule, let alone that the state should
be hostile to religion, though, of course, such radical views are also
amongst those recognizable as political secularism. Many different insti-
tutional arrangements and many different political views and ideolo-
gies, democratic and anti-democratic, liberal and illiberal, pro-religion
and anti-religion, are consistent with this minimal conception of secu-
larism: the non-domination of political authority by religious authority.
I take subscription to this idea to be central to modernity and therefore
one of the dominant ideas of the twentieth century. I do not mean that
everybody in modern societies agrees with this view and, of course, like
all ideas, it is not perfectly or purely manifested in any actual case, and
people will disagree about the specific cases. Nevertheless, like democ-
racy, political secularism is a hegemonic idea that most people actively
and passively support and few argue against in a full-throated way.
An increasing number of academics think that in recent years some-
thing highly significant, possibly epochal, has happened to this state of
affairs. Established modern societies are producing critics of this taken-
for-granted idea in their midst and emergent modern societies do not
seem to be smoothly following in the path that led to the historical
ascendancy of political secularism. My interest is specifically in Western

14
 Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe? 15

Europe. Jürgen Habermas, who has Western Europe very much at

the forefront of his mind, has famously announced we are currently
witnessing a transition from a secular to a ‘postsecular society’ in which
‘secular citizens’ have to express a previously denied respect for ‘reli-
gious citizens’, who should be allowed, even encouraged, to critique
aspects of contemporary society and to find solutions to its problems
from within their religious views (Habermas, 2006). Instead of treating
religion as subrational and a matter of private concern only, religion
is once again to be recognized as a legitimate basis of public engage-
ment and political action. Some have gone further and speak of a global
crisis. Even quite sober academics speak today of ‘a contemporary crisis
of secularism’ (Scherer, 2010: 4) and that ‘today, political secularisms are
in crisis in almost every corner of the globe’ (Jakelić, 2010: 3). Olivier
Roy, in an analysis focused on France writes of ‘the crisis of the secular
state’(Roy, 2007) and Rajeev Bhargava of the ‘crisis of the secular state in
Europe’ (Bhargava, 2010, 2011).2
Of course there is a larger and more specifically sociological thesis
about ‘desecularization’ across the world, about the development of
modern economies and institutions without a decline, and indeed by
some reversal of an earlier decline in religious belief and practice (Berger,
1999). My interest is limited to the phenomenon of public religion and
of how religion is fighting back from its political marginalization. Across
the globe, religious groups are protesting against perceived demotion or
marginalization in the public space. There is a sense of actual or poten-
tial marginality, both culturally and politically, of losing the public space
that should rightfully, at least partly, belong to one (Jurgensmeyer, 1994;
Marty and Appleby, 1994). This can lead to protest and even anger and
an assertive politics. Yet, while in most parts of the world the protestors
seek to restore a real, or more probably imagined past – a golden age
before the marginalization – this is not the case in Western Europe.3
More fundamentally, while in the other regions there is a sense that a
religious majority has been or is being marginalized, in Western Europe,
the group most expressing its sense of marginalization is a minority. So,
while the religionist agitation in the US, the Muslim world, and India
is about the status and re-empowerment of the religious majority, of
making the country in the image of the religious majority, the issue in
Europe is about the status of a minority and its right to change the coun-
tries that it has recently become part of or is trying to be accepted as part
of. In so far as the dominant religion, Christianity, exhibits a new found
political assertiveness, it is in reaction to the minority presence and poli-
tics and in a context of continuing decline in Christian religiosity and
16 Tariq Modood

church membership. The majoritarian reaction is sometimes in terms of

a sympathetic multiculturalist or multifaith accommodation but all too
often, and growingly, in secularist and Christianist oppositional modes.
The majority are reacting to the minority, not to the felt constraints of
‘secularism’ and so the form of the challenge is not a religious resurgence
but an ethno-religious multiculturalism – indeed, not postsecularism
but secularism, or neo-secularism, is one of the leading majoritarian
responses, especially in France.

The accommodation of Muslims in Western Europe

There is no endogenous slowing down in secularization in rela-

tion to organized religion, attendance at church services, and tradi-
tional Christian belief and practice in Western Europe. For example,
to illustrate with the British case, church attendance of at least once
a month amongst white people has steadily declined from about 20
per cent in 1983 to about 15 per cent in 2008 and with each younger
age cohort (Voas and Crockett, 2005; BRIN, 2011; Kaufmann, Goujon,
and Skirbekk, 2013). Which is not to say that religion has disappeared
or is about to but for many it has become more in the form of ‘belief
without belonging’ (Davie, 1994) or spirituality (Heelas and Woodhead,
2005) or ‘implicit religion’ (Bailey, 1997). For example, while belief in
a personal God has gone down from over 40 per cent in the middle of
the twentieth century to less than 30 per cent by its end, belief in a
spirit or life source has remained steady at around 35–40 per cent and
belief in the soul has actually increased from less than 60 per cent in the
early 1980s to an additional 5–10 per cent today (BRIN, 2011). All these
changes, however, are highly compatible with political secularism if not
with scientism or other rationalistic philosophies. Whether the decline
of traditional religion is being replaced by no religion or new ways of
being religious or spiritual, neither is creating a challenge for political
secularism. Non-traditional forms of Christian or post-Christian religion
in Western Europe are, in the main, not attempting to connect with
or reform political institutions and government policies; they are not
seeking recognition or political accommodation or political power.4
In recent decades, Western Europe has come to share the post-immi-
gration racial and ethnic urban diversity, which has long been a charac-
teristic of the United States.5 Currently, most of the largest, especially the
capital, cities of north-west Europe are about 20–35 per cent non-white
(i.e., people of non-European descent, including Turks). Even without
further large-scale immigration, being a young, fertile population, these
 Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe? 17

proportions will grow for at least one or two generations more before
they stabilize, reaching or exceeding 50 per cent in some cities in the
next few decades or sooner. The trend will include some of the larger
urban centres of southern Europe. A significant difference between
Western Europe and the US, however, is that the majority of non-whites
in the countries of Europe are Muslims.6 With estimates of 12 million
to over 17 million Muslims in Western Europe today, the Muslim popu-
lation in the former EU-15 is only about three to five per cent and is
relatively evenly distributed across the larger states (Peach, 2007; Pew
Forum, 2010). In the larger cities, the proportion which is Muslim,
however, is several times larger and growing at a faster rate than most of
the population (Lutz, Skirbekk, and Testa, 2007). In this context, with
the riots in the suburbs (banlieues) of Paris and elsewhere, the Danish
cartoon affair and other issues about offence and freedom of speech,
and the proliferating bans on various forms of female Muslim dress just
being a few in a series of conflicts focused on minority-majority rela-
tions, questions about integration, equality, racism, and Islam, and their
relation to terrorism, security, and foreign policy, have become central
to European politics.
The issue, then, driving the sense of a crisis of secularism that some
sense in Western Europe is the place of religious identities, or iden-
tities that are or are perceived to be an ethno-religious identity (like
British Asian Muslim or Arab Muslim in France), in the public life of
the countries of the region. This multicultural challenge to secularism,
is amongst the most profound political and long-term issues to arise
from the post-war Western European hunger for labour migrants and
the reversal of the population flows of European colonialism. The chal-
lenge is far from confined to secularism. It is a broad one: from socio-
economic disadvantage and discrimination in the labour markets at one
end to a constitutional status or corporate relationship with the state
at the other. Moreover, the awareness of this challenge is not due to
terrorism, as it began to manifest itself and was perceived before events
such as 9/11; nor is it due to the fact that some Muslims, unlike other
post-immigration groups, may have been involved in rowdy demonstra-
tions and riots, because some African-Caribbeans were associated with
these without raising such profound normative questions. Nor is it due
to (Muslim) conservative values, especially in relation to gender and
sexuality, though it is related to it.
The core element of the challenge is the primacy given by some
muslims to religion as the basis of identity, organization, political repre-
sentation, normative justification, etc. These matters were thought to
18 Tariq Modood

be more or less settled (except in a few exceptional cases like Northern

Ireland) till some Muslims started to assert themselves as Muslims in the
public sphere of various West European countries. Some have thought
that primacy could be given to, say, gender, ethnicity, or class; others
have thought that primacy should not be given to any one or even a few
of these social categories as identity self-concepts, but very few thought
that religion should be in the select set (Modood, 2005; Modood,
Triandafyllidou, and Zapata-Barrero, 2006).

Multiculturalism

It is not the mere presence of Muslims or Islam that creates a challenge

all by itself. It is the presence of Muslims mediated by or in interaction
with contemporary values of European states and politics. In particular,
we should attend to two key complexes of political ideas, norms and
practices which predate and are independent of Muslim immigrant poli-
tics but which make available a certain political opportunity structure
for Muslims to make claims which create majoritarian and secularist
anxieties. Muslims have been able to adapt and utilize these evolving
political complexes and this gives a distinctive character to the phenom-
enon of interest.
The first one of these is not to do with secularism or desecularization
or public assertive religious, per se, but with claims for accommodation
from within Western polities and normative viewpoints in relation to
minorities generally. Let us call these debates and activities ‘multicul-
turalism’. These discourses and practices of non-discrimination, rights,
equal accommodation, and respect are largely discourses from within
Western European normative debates, norms, and laws (though influ-
enced by a larger climate of opinion led particularly by Anglophone,
colonial settler, and immigration-based countries such as the US,
Canada, and Australia). They are picked up post-immigration and when
Muslims or other groups utilize them, the reference is to the status and
resources available to other groups in the West, not ‘homelands’.7 The
second complex I have in mind is the religion-state linkages and support
structures that exist in Western European countries, which I will call
‘moderate secularism’.
Multicultural citizenship refers to the presence of ideas, ethos, and
politics of ‘difference’, which allows for the articulation and legitimacy
(and illegitimacy) of dealing with certain kinds of claims, in ways that
are deemed acceptable and satisfactory. Briefly, I mean three things
 Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe? 19

here (for further details, see Modood, 2007). Firstly, there is the critique
of those portrayals of political systems, including contemporary liberal
democratic states like those of Western Europe, as consisting of universal
norms and rights. The critique is that such norms and rights are inflected
by particular historical traditions and national cultures which give
distinctive interpretations to ideas such as individual and group, public
and private, rights and obligations, and so create a de facto second-class
citizenship for those who do not identify with that culture or are not
privileged within it. Secondly, that despite legal definitions and ideal-
ized norms of equality between all individuals, many people see either
themselves and/or other citizens not just as individuals or citizens but
in terms of membership of groups, such as women, black people, or
Muslims. These identities are often imposed upon individuals as markers
of social inferiority but equally (and simultaneously) can be forms of self-
identity and pride and indeed resistance to inferiorization. Given this,
thirdly, the challenge of creating equality between historically privileged
and disadvantaged groups within a citizenry is unlikely to be achieved
by acting as if group identities no longer exist. In relation to colour
racism such pretence is called the pursuit of colour-blind policies and,
by analogy, one can speak of gender blindness and Muslim blindness in
relation to citizenship equality. It is contended that full civic equality
will require not just policies treating all citizens as individuals but, addi-
tionally, policies, institutions, and discourses which ‘recognize’ (Taylor,
1994) that certain group identities are victims of negative treatment, are
not going to disappear, and should not be required to disappear. So the
best approach is a politics of respect which turns these negative identi-
ties into positively valued ones and to remake our sense of common citi-
zenship and nationality to include them. This is my understanding of
political multiculturalism based on the ideas of political theorists such
as Charles Taylor, Bhikhu Parekh, Iris Young, and Will Kymlicka, though
I understand that it is not what many Western European politicians,
journalists, and social commentators who are critical of multicultur-
alism may mean by multiculturalism (Modood, 2007, 2011a). My point
is that it is the presence, adaptation, and disputation of these ideas and
rhetorics which gives the question of the accommodation of Muslims
the character it has, namely a multiculturalist character. The result is
that to talk about the integration of Muslims in Western Europe today is
to argue about multiculturalism. Indeed, the converse has also become
true. To talk about multiculturalism today in Western Europe is to talk
about – pro and con – the accommodation of Muslims.
20 Tariq Modood

Moderate secularism

It is undeniably true that in terms of vocabulary, concepts, and institu-

tional practices each country in Western Europe is a secular state, but
each has its own distinctive take on what this means. Nevertheless,
there is a general historical character, which I call moderate secularism,
and a lesser strand. The latter is principally manifested in French secu-
larism (laïcité), which seeks to create a public space in which religion is
virtually banished in the name of reason and emancipation, and reli-
gious organizations are monitored by the state through consultative
national mechanisms. The main Western European approach, however,
sees organized religion as not just a private benefit but a potential public
good or national resource, and which the state can in some circum-
stances assist to realize – even through an ‘established’ church (Modood,
2010). These public benefits can be direct, such as a contribution to
education and social care through autonomous church-based organi-
zations funded by the taxpayer; or indirect, such as the production of
attitudes that create economic hope or family stability; and they can
have to do with national identity, cultural heritage, ethical voice, and
national ceremonies.
Western Europe has been a site of a historical struggle between
public churches and political secularists, yet during the nineteenth
and especially the twentieth centuries – and especially in Protestant-
majority societies – this has not been deeply conflictual and has taken
the form of various shifting compromises. The compromises consisted
of a successful accommodation of an expanding number of Christian
churches within the business and symbolic workings of the state, yet
marked by a gradual but decisive weakening of the public and political
character of the churches. The 1960s till the end of the century saw a
particularly strong movement of opinion and politics in favour of the
secularists. In Western Europe, the cultural revolution of the 1960s has
been broadly accepted; not only has there been no major, sustained
counter-movement but it broadened out from north-western Protestant/
secular Europe into Catholic Europe. So, for example, the national
system of ‘pillarization’ in the Netherlands, by which Protestants and
Catholics had separate access to some of the state’s resources, emerged
in the nineteenth century, declined sharply in the middle of the twen-
tieth, and was formally wound up in 1983. The Lutheran Church in
Sweden was disestablished in 2000. In the UK, disestablishment of the
Church of England was embraced in the early 1990s by the Liberal
Democrats (the third political party in the country), by the influential
 Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe? 21

think tank, Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) (probably the

largest British think tank in the 1990s and a key player in the remaking
of the post-Thatcher Labour Party into a governing party), by the left
wing of the Labour Party, and the two liberal-left broadsheets (for
details, see Modood, 1992: 85 and 1994). Catholic countries – Italy,
Spain, Portugal, and Ireland – in the 1980s and 1990s showed rapid
signs of the secularization characteristic of Protestant Europe (cf. Davie,
1999: 69–70, 2002: 6–7).
Of course, this has not meant that public religion, even the formal
connexions to the state and direct access to governments, disappeared
altogether. There has been a trend towards less public recognition, but it
has not led to anything like a terminal endpoint, not even in France. Nor,
on the other hand, has there been much political challenge from organ-
ized religion or political conflict involving religion (Northern Ireland’s
exceptional character proving the rule). The place of religion in Western
Europe has been relatively uncontroversial in the last decades of the twen-
tieth century because religion has not been particularly visible and there
has been a general assumption – perhaps shared by many religious people,
perhaps even by religious lobbies – that the decreasing public presence of
religion is irreversible and better than a political fight to reverse the trend
or to take decisive action to take it to its endpoint. Religion did not cease
to be public, but because it was not felt to be too challenging or threat-
ening it was noticed less. For example, a political campaign on a religious
matter, or led by religious people, was less likely to be reported by the
media than, say, an anti-racist or environmentalist protest.

Responding to Muslim assertiveness

This, then, is the context in which non-Christian migrants have been

arriving and settling and in which they and the next generation were
becoming active members of their societies, including making political
claims of equality and accommodation. So, the rising multicultural
challenge and the gradual weakening of the political status of Christian
churches, in particular the national churches, were taking place at the
same time. The intersection of these two trajectories is nicely captured in
two policy initiatives in the Netherlands in 1983. In that year in which
the national system of ‘pillarization’ – which had at one time made the
country a bi-religious communal state – was formally wound up, a new
Minorities Policy (Nota Minderhedenbeleid) was announced (see Bader,
2011; Lentin and Titley, 2011: 107–108) that created post-immigration
ethnic minorities (allochtones) as a mini-pillar, giving them state funding
22 Tariq Modood

for faith schools, ethno-religious radio and TV broadcasting, and other

forms of cultural maintenance (Bader, 2011).
Some of that policy began to be reversed in the 1990s, but looking
beyond the Netherlands, the pivotal moment was 1988–1989 and was,
quite accidentally, marked by two events. These created national and
international storms and set in motion political developments which
have not been reversed and offer contrasting ways in which the two
Western European secularisms are responding to the Muslim presence.
The events were the protests in Britain against the Sir Salman Rushdie’s
novel, The Satanic Verses; and, in France, the decision by a school head
teacher to prohibit entry to three girls till they were willing to take off
their headscarves in school premises.
The Satanic Verses was not banned in the UK as the protestors demanded
and the conduct of some Muslims, especially those threatening the life
of the author, certainly shocked and alienated many from the campaign.
In that sense, the Muslim campaign clearly failed. In other respects,
however, it galvanized many into seeking a democratic multiculturalism
that was inclusive of Muslims. A national body was created to represent
mainstream Muslim opinion, initially in relation to the novel (UK Action
Committee on Islamic Affairs) but later, with some encouragement from
both the main national political parties, especially New Labour, it led to
a body to lobby on behalf of Muslims in the corridors of power. This new
body, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was accepted as a consultee
by the New Labour government of 1997 till about the middle of the
next decade when it looked for new interlocutors. The MCB was very
successful in relation to its founding agenda (Modood, 2011b). By 2001,
it had achieved its aim of having Muslim issues and Muslims as a group
recognized separately from issues of race and ethnicity; and of being itself
accepted by government, media, and civil society as the spokesperson
for Muslims. Two additional achieved aims were the state funding of
Muslim schools on the same basis as Christian and Jewish schools and
getting certain educational and employment policies targeted on the
severe disadvantage of the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (who are nearly
all Muslims) as opposed to on minority ethnicity generally. Additionally,
it played a decisive role in getting Tony Blair to go against ministerial
and civil service advice and insert a religion question into the 2001
UK Census (Sherif, 2011). This meant that the ground was laid for the
possible later introduction of policies targeting Muslims to match those
targeting groups defined by race or ethnicity – or gender. The MCB had to
wait a bit longer to get the legislative protection it sought. Laws against
religious discrimination were introduced in 2003, strengthened in 2007
 Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe? 23

and again in 2010, making them much stronger than anything available
in the rest of the European Union (EU). Incitement to religious hatred,
the legislation most closely connected to the protests over The Satanic
Verses, was introduced in 2006, though there is no suggestion that it
would have caught that novel. Indeed, the protestors’ original demand
that the blasphemy law be extended to cover Islam has been made inap-
plicable, as the blasphemy law was abolished in 2008 – with very little
protest from anybody. Moreover, even as the MCB, because of its views
on the government’s foreign and security policies, fell out of favour,
local and national consultations with Muslim groups has continued to
grow and probably now exceeds consultations with any Christian body
and certainly any minority group. Inevitably, this has caused occasional
friction between Christians and Muslims. But on the whole, these devel-
opments have taken place not only with the support of the leadership of
the Church of England but in a spirit of interfaith respect. (Given how
adversarial English intellectual, journalistic, legal, and political culture
is, religion in England is oddly fraternal and little effort is expended in
proving that the other side is in a state of error and should convert.)
So, that is one path of development from 1988–1989. As can be seen, it
was a mobilization of a minority and the extension of minority policies
from race to religion in order to accommodate the religious minority.
The other development, namely the one arising from the headscarf case
(l’affaire foulard), was one of top-down state action to prohibit certain
minority practices. From the start, the majority of the country – whether
it be media, the public intellectuals, the politicians, or public opinion –
were supportive of the head teacher who refused to have religious head-
scarves in school (Bowen, 2007; Scott, 2007). Muslims either did not
wish to or lacked the capacity to challenge this dominant view with
anything like the publicity, organization, clamour, or international
assistance that Muslims in Britain bore to bear on Rushdie’s novel.
The Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, emphasized
freedom of religion as long as the religious symbols were not ‘ostenta-
tious’ and so ruled that the issue should be treated on a case by case
basis (Kastoryano, 2006; see also Bowen, 2007). This quietened things
down till they blew up again in 1994 in relation to another state school.
On that occasion the Minister of Education forbade the wearing of any
ostentatious symbols, which explicitly included the headscarf. The issue
would not go away, however, and in 2003 President Chirac appointed
a national commission, chaired by Bernard Stasi, to consider the issue.
The Stasi Commission recommended the banning of the wearing of
conspicuous religious symbols in state schools, and a law to this effect
24 Tariq Modood

was passed with an overwhelming majority by Parliament in February

2004. A few years later the target of secularist and majoritarian disap-
proval was the full face veil with just the eyes showing (niqab; burqa), as
favoured by a few hundred Muslim women. This was banned in public
places in April 2011. Belgium followed suit in July 2011 and Italy is in
the process of doing so (Guardian, 2011). Similar proposals are being
discussed by governments and political parties across Western Europe
(e.g., the Dutch government [Nikolas, 2011] and the ruling Labour Party
in Norway [Larsen and Barstad, 2011]). Even in Britain there is popular
support for a ban though the major parties have no truck with it.
While the radical secularist (laïcité) trajectory of the banning of
some headdress favoured by some Muslim women was taking place,
another was simultaneously taking place in countries like France, which
is important to note as it does not so easily conform to the common
understanding of French laïcité. Since 1990, each French government,
whether of the left or the right, have set about trying to create a national
Muslim council that would be a corporate representative of Muslims in
France and the official government consultee. It would be the state’s
recognition of Islam comparable in some respects to its recognition of
the Catholic and Protestant churches, and the Jewish consistory. After
at least three abortive attempts by previous interior ministers, Interior
Minister Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurated the Conseil Français du Culte
Musulman in 2003 (Modood and Kastoryano, 2006: 174–175). Even now,
this council has not yet come to be accepted by the majority of Muslims
in France and has had little influence on the French media, civil society,
or government. Its importance for my argument does not depend on its
effectiveness or on whether it has support amongst Muslims in France.
I mention it because it exhibits how even a laicist, anti-multiculturalist
state, which is supported by most citizens in attacking fundamental reli-
gious freedom, is creating institutional linkages to govern Muslims in a
way which is prima facie contrary to laïcité. It is not, however, contrary
to the Western Europe tradition of moderate secularism, and France is
not alone in following a path comprising of anti-multiculturalist rhet-
oric – refusal to offer accommodation on specifics,8 but a willingness to
deal with Muslims not just as individual citizens but also as a religious
group. Chancellor Merkel’s government in Germany assembled a group
of Muslims in 2006 in order to hold an Islamkonfrenz at the highest
level of government and this has been repeated every year. Interestingly,
the secularist strand of opinion in Britain, which looks to France as a
model, is opposed to the government giving special consultative status
to Muslim organizations and sees this as consistent with the older
 Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe? 25

demand for the disestablishment of the Church of England, the removal

of bishops from a democratized House of Lords, and a reduction in the
number of state-funded faith schools.9

Additional responses: Christian values and muscular

liberalism

So, two responses have manifested themselves to Muslim action and

claims-making: the accommodationist approach – which through
dialogue, negotiation, and adaptation has tried to find a space for
Muslims within an older, broad racial equality and multiculturalist orien-
tation – and a radical secularist approach. Two other sentiments can also
be identified: a Christianist sentiment and an intolerant or ‘muscular’
liberalism sentiment. By this I do not mean to say that Christians and
liberals were not party to the first two approaches. The churches, espe-
cially the Church of England, have been actively involved in supporting
British multiculturalism and developing interfaith dialogue, networks,
and policy coalitions with Muslims and other minorities. Similarly,
what I refer to as liberal intolerance overlaps with the secularist intol-
erance that has already been discussed. What is distinctive about the
following two responses to Muslims is that one makes an explicit appeal
to Christianity, and the other makes an explicit appeal to the limits of
the prized value of toleration.
The reference to Christianity can be quite distant from policy. For
example, it seems that the presence and salience of Muslims can be
a factor in stimulating a Christian identity. An analysis of the volun-
tary religion question in the 2001 UK Census shows higher ‘Christian’
identification in areas near large Muslim populations (Voas and Bruce,
2004). The emergence of a new, sometimes politically assertive, cultural
identification with Christianity has been noted in Denmark (Mouritsen,
2006), and in Germany, Chancellor Merkel has recently asserted that
‘[t]hose who don’t accept [Christian values] don’t have a place here’
(cited in Presseurop, 2010, reported as ‘Muslims in her country should
adopt Christian values’). Since then, several senior Bavarian politicians
have made the link between German nationalism and Christianity even
more emphatically (Fekete, 2011: 46). Similar sentiments were voiced
in the EU constitution debate and are apparent in the ongoing debate
about Turkey as a future EU member (Casanova, 2009). These asser-
tions of Christianity are not necessarily accompanied by any increase
in expressions of faith or church attendance, which continue to decline
across Europe. What is at work is not the repudiation of a status quo
26 Tariq Modood

secularism (Casanova, 2009) in favour of Christianity but a response to

the challenge of multiculturalism (as Merkel made explicit by asserting
that ‘multi-kulti’ had failed and was not wanted back). Former French
President Giscard d’Estaing, who chaired the Convention on the Future
of Europe, the body which drafted the (abortive) EU constitution,
expresses nicely the assertiveness I speak of: ‘I never go to Church, but
Europe is a Christian continent.’10
Such political views, however, are also being expressed by Christian
organizations, especially by the Catholic Church. Early in his papacy,
Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech at the Bavarian Catholic University at
Regensburg, suggested that while reason was central to Christian divinity,
this was not the case with the God of Islam, which licenced conversion
by the sword and was deeply antithetical to the European tradition of
rationality.11 It has been argued that Pope John Paul II ‘looked at the
essential cleavage in the world as being between religion and unbelief.
Devout Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists had more in common with
each other than with atheists’ (Caldwell, 2009: 151). Pope Benedict, the
same author contends, ‘thinks that, within societies, believers and unbe-
lievers exist in symbiosis. Secular Westerners, he implies, have a lot in
common with their religious fellows’ (Caldwell, 2009: 151). The sugges-
tion is that secularists and Christians in Europe have more in common
with each other than they do with Muslims. That many secularists do
not share Pope Benedict’s view is evident from the fact that the proposed
clause about Christianity was absent from the final draft of the abortive
EU constitution. Moreover, it is indicative of the place of Christianity
in Europe relative to radical secularism, that it emerged as a third, not
a first or second, trend. That is to say, it joined a debate in which the
running had been mainly made by an accommodationist multicultur-
alism and an exclusionist secularism allied with nationalism. Yet, while
there is little sign of a Christian right in Europe of the kind that is strong
in the US, there is, to some degree, a reinforcing or renewing of a sense
that Europe is ‘secular Christian’, analogous to the term ‘secular Jew’ to
describe someone of Jewish descent who has a sense of Jewish identity
but is not religiously practising and may even be an atheist.
A fourth trend focuses on Muslims’ conservative or illiberal moral
values and practices. These are likely to centre on issues of gender and
sexuality, and so this trend overlaps with that which has led to legal
restrictions on the wearing of the headscarf and the face veil but is
worth identifying separately, as it goes much wider and can be inde-
pendent of questions of religion-state relations. It is alleged that the
state needs to take special action against Muslims because, for example,
 Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe? 27

their attitudes to, but not only, gender equality and sexual orientation
equality are less than and threatening to reverse what has been achieved
in Western countries. This argument is found across the region and across
the political and intellectual spectrum but is particularly strong in the
Netherlands. Pim Fortuyn’s call, for example, at the turn of this century,
for a halt to Muslim immigration because of their views on sex and
personal freedom achieved considerable electoral success (Economist,
2002). The Dutch government produced a video to be shown to prospec-
tive Muslim immigrants which included a close-up of a topless woman
on a beach and gay men kissing in a park to assist in the process of
assessing applicants for entry into the country (Monshipouri, 2010:
51). In neighbouring Denmark, the newspaper Jyllands-Posten famously
published satirical and irreverent cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad
to, according to its cultural editor, assist Muslims to be acculturalized
into Danish public culture (Levey and Modood, 2009: 227).12 Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch MP of Somali Muslim origin, became an inter-
national figure through her argument that the subordination of women
was a core feature of orthodox Islam. The position I am referring to
could be said to be a form of liberal perfectionism; that is to say, the
view, in contrast to a Rawlsian neutralism, that it is the business of a
liberal state to produce liberal individuals and promote a liberal way
of life (Mouritsen and Olsen, 2012), perhaps what Charles Taylor once
called, liberalism as ‘a fighting creed’ or what Prime Minister Cameron
has called ‘muscular liberalism’. Its actual political dynamic has been
to create and lead popular anti-Muslim hostility as in the form of Geert
Wilders’s comparison of the Qur’an with Mein Kampf and campaign to
ban the former as long as the latter is banned. His campaign against the
‘Islamization of Europe’ has many echoes across Western Europe and
not just across the Netherlands, where the Party for Freedom he founded
in 2005 became the third-largest party in the 2010 elections and a nego-
tiating partner in the formation of a government.

Islamophobia

In relation to the topic of this article, this ‘muscular liberalism’ is perhaps

squarely with the radical secularism of the hijab and burqa bans (that is
how it has been interpreted by Christian Joppke, 2009),13 but I mention
it separately as it is intellectually distinct and, more importantly, because
it helps to bring out that the dynamic which political secularism – and
indeed liberalism – is being subjected to and is being tested on is the
presence of Muslims and anti-Muslim hostility from various intellectual
28 Tariq Modood

and political directions. Another example of this broad anti-Muslim

coalition is the majority that voted in a referendum to ban the building
of minarets in Switzerland in 2009. It has been analysed as including
those whose primary motivation is women’s rights to those ‘who simply
feel that Islam is “foreign”’, who may have no problems with Muslims
per se but who are not ready to accept ‘Islam’s acquiring of visibility in
public spaces’ (Mayer, 2009: 6) and generally did not vote ‘out of a desire
to oppress anybody, but because they are themselves feeling threatened
by what they see as an Islam invasion’ (Mayer, 2009: 8). So, prejudiced
or fearful perceptions of Islam are capable of uniting a wide range of
opinion into a majority, including those who have no strong views
about church-state arrangements, as indeed has been apparent from the
very beginning that Muslim claims became public controversies.
It means that the current challenge to secularism in Western Europe
is being debated not just in terms of the wider issues of integration and
multiculturalism but also in terms of a hostility to Muslims and Islam
based on stereotypes and scare stories in the media that are best under-
stood as a specific form of cultural racism that has come to be called
Islamophobia (Meer and Modood, 2010; Sayyid and Vakil, 2010) and is
largely unrelated to questions of secularism. A meta-analysis of opinion
polls between 1998 and 2006 in Britain concluded that ‘between one
in five and one in four Britons now exhibits a strong dislike of, and
prejudice against, Islam and Muslims’ (Field, 2007: 465). A Pew survey
in 2008 confirmed the higher figure and found its equivalent in France
to be nearly double (38 per cent) and just over 50 per cent in Germany
(Pew Research Center, 2008). These views are growing, are finding expres-
sion in the rise of extreme right-wing parties, and even in terrorism, as
happened in Oslo and the island of Utøya in July 2011 (Bangstad, 2011).
This, to put it mildly, is not a favourable context for accommodating
Muslims and underscores the point that the so-called crisis of secularism
is really about the presence and integration of Muslims, which, of course,
partly depends upon how some Muslims behave (e.g., acts of terrorism
or declarations of disloyalty to the country).
So, looking at the four trends and the wider Islamophobic climate of
opinion, it looks as if the radical secularist trend and the Christianist
trend could unite through a cultural nationalism or a cultural
Europeanism animated by an Islamophobia. I hope not, I would like
to think that the spectre of a populist, right-wing nationalism, not to
mention racism, will make enough people rally round a moderate secu-
larism, which they will recognize has to be pluralized. But either way,
what this analysis suggests is that the real choice is between a pluralist,
 Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe? 29

multi-faith nationality or Europeanism and a monoculturalist nation-

alism or Europeanism. Or, to put it another way, the crisis of secularism
is best understood within a framework of multiculturalism. Of course,
multiculturalism currently has few advocates at the moment and the
term is highly damaged.14 Yet, the repeated declarations from the senior
politicians of the region that ‘multiculturalism is dead’ (Fekete, 2011) are
a reaction to the continuing potency of multiculturalism which renders
obsolete liberal takes on assimilation and integration with new forms of
public gender and public ethnicity, and now public religion. Muslims are
late joiners of this movement, but when they did so, it slowly becomes
apparent that the secularist status quo, with certain residual privileges
for Christians, is untenable as it stands. We can call this the challenge
of integration rather than multiculturalism, as long as it is understood
that we are not just talking about an integration into the day-to-day
life of a society but also into its institutional architecture, grand narra-
tives, and macro-symbolic sense of itself (Modood, 2012). If these issues
were dead, we would not be having a debate about the role of public
religion or coming up with proposals for dialogue with Muslims and
the accommodation of Islam. The dynamic for change is not directly
to do with the historic religion nor the historic secularism of Western
Europe; rather the novelty, which then has implications for Christians
and secularists, and to which they are reacting, is the appearance of an
assertive multiculturalism which cannot be contained within a matrix
of individual rights, conscience, religious freedom, and so on. If any of
these were different the problems would be other than they are – just
as today we look at issues to do with, say, women or homosexuality not
simply in terms of rights but in a political environment influenced by
feminism and gay liberation, within a socio-political-intellectual culture
in which the ‘assertion of positive difference’ or ‘identity’ is a shaping
and forceful presence. It does not mean everybody is a feminist now,
but a heightened consciousness of gender and gender equality creates
a certain gender-equality sensibility. Similarly, my claim is that a multi-
culturalist sensibility today is present in Western Europe and yet it is not
comfortable with extending itself to accommodate Muslims nor able to
find reasons for not extending to Muslims without self-contradiction.

Conclusion

Political secularism has been destabilized. In particular, the historical

flow from a moderate to radical secularism and the expectation of
its continuation has been jolted. This is not because of any Christian
30 Tariq Modood

desecularization or a ‘return of the repressed’. Rather, the jolt is created

by the triple contingency of the arrival and settlement of a significant
number of Muslims; a multiculturalist sensibility which respects ‘differ-
ence’; and a moderate secularism, namely that the historical compro-
mises between the state and a church or churches in relation to public
recognition and accommodation are still in place to some extent. To
speak of a ‘crisis of secularism’ is highly exaggerated, especially in rela-
tion to the state. It is true that the challenge is much greater for laïcité or
radical secularism as an ideology. As many social and political theorists
are sympathetic to this ideology, and in any case, being more sensitive to
abstract ideas, they are less able to see the actually existing secularism of
Western Europe, with the exception of France, is not the radical variant.
They, thus, mistakenly project the incompatibility between their ideas
and the accommodation of Muslims onto the Western European states.
Indeed, as applied to Western Europe ‘crisis of secularism’ is not only
exaggerated but misleading. As I hope I have shown, the problem is
more defined by issues of post-immigration integration than by the reli-
gion-state relation per se. The ‘crisis of secularism’ is really the challenge
of multiculturalism. Far from this entailing the end of secularism as we
know it, moderate secularism offers some of the resources for accom-
modating Muslims. Political secularists should think pragmatically and
institutionally on how to achieve this; namely, how to multiculturalize
moderate secularism, and avoid exacerbating the crisis and limiting the
room for manoeuvre, by pressing for further, radical secularism.

Notes
1. This paper was first published as ‘Is There a Crisis of Secularism in Western
Europe?’ in Sociology of Religion Summer 2012, 73(2), 109–129, doi:10.1093/
socrel/srs029. ‘Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto
God the things that are God’s’ is, of course, a political view, or about politics,
based on the authority of St Matthew’s Gospel.
2. Bhargava does not believe the crisis is confined to Europe; see also Zucca (2009).
3. Peter Berger expressly mentions ‘Europe, west of what used to be called the
Iron Curtain’ as an exception to his desecularization thesis (1999: 9). This is a
good geographic approximation of what I mean by Western Europe.
4. It may be the case that some government policies are seeking to delegate
certain welfare responsibilities, but that is not based on rethinking secularism
or Christianity but on wishing to limit the scale of the state for revenue or
other reasons.
5. Of course, the presence of black people in the US as a whole is a consequence
not of immigration but slavery, but the urban racial and ethnic mix is due to
internal migration as well as to many waves of immigration.
6. The UK, where Muslims form about a third of non-whites or ethnic minori-
ties, is one of the exceptions.
 Is There a Crisis of ‘Postsecularism’ in Western Europe? 31

7. Though new discourses of Islam emerge that develop these concepts and see
the ideals of some contemporary Western publics (e.g., feminists, multicul-
turalists, anti-imperialists, etc.) as ideals within Islam, too, that have regret-
tably been obscured in the past (see, e.g., Safi, 2003).
8. Sometimes refusal at a national level is accompanied by local compromises
(Bowen, 2010).
9. See National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association websites;
for similar views amongst centre-left Christians, see the website of the think
tank, Ekklesia.
10. More recently, Prime Minister Cameron, who has confessed to not being a
steadfast believer, made a major speech arguing that Britons should not be
shy of asserting that Britain is a Christian country (http://www.number10.
gov.uk/news/king-james-bible). While many secularists protested, the speech
was welcomed by the chair of the Mosque and Community Affairs of the
Muslim Council of Britain, Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra (http://www.bbc.co.uk/
news/uk-16231223).
11. November 2006, http://www.zenit.org/article-16955?l=english.
12. Even though he, or at least his newspaper, took a different view of an anti-
Christian cartoon earlier (Fouché, 2006).
13. ‘Perfectionist liberalism is not intolerant per se ... Intolerance (and conflict
with traditional liberal pluralism) enters at the point where officially
promoted ideals of good liberal citizenship come to be seen as so important,
so threatened, and so much in conflict with specific un-civic (religious) prac-
tices and dispositions, concentrated in defined and targetable out-groups,
that attempts to change, penalize or even outlaw them become legitimate’
(Mouritsen and Olsen, 2012).
14. Which does not mean subscription to the thesis that multiculturalism is
in retreat. Firstly, analysis of policies in 21 countries shows that whilst the
growth of multicultural policies between 1980 and 2000 was modest, far from
halting or retreating continued to progress between 2000-2010, with only
three countries having a lower score in 2010 than 2000 (MCP Index: http://
www.queensu.ca/mcp/immigrant/table/Immigrant_Minorities_Table_2.pdf).
An alternative index of fourteen countries confirms this “consolidation at
moderate levels of multicultural policies, albeit with important cross-na-
tional variation in both directions” (Koopmans 2013: 8).Secondly, much of
the anti-multiculturalism cannot be justified within the terms of assimilation
and individual integration (Modood, 2011).

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2
Reawakening Enlightenment?
Contesting Religion and Politics in
European Public Discourse
Anders Berg-Sørensen

Introduction

Free speech has become a battle point between religious and secular
political movements in twenty-first century European public discourse.
Consider a few highly contested recent cases: the movie Submission and
the murder of its director Theo van Gogh in November 2004; the twelve
cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad published in the Danish
daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 and the subsequent
death threats, impassioned demonstrations, burning of flags and embas-
sies in Muslim countries; the debate on the Qur’an critical movie Fitna
released in March 2008 by Dutch right-wing politician Geert Wilders,
founder of the Party for Freedom fighting against immigration; the
debate on boycotting the UN Durban Review Conference in April 2009
because of restrictions of free speech for reasons of blasphemy and the
violent reactions against the recently released YouTube movie Innocence
of Muslims in September 2012. And the list goes on.
Engaging in such cases, European politicians and intellectuals are
debating the constitutive values of European democracies, such as
freedom of speech vis-à-vis self-censorship; equal worth and dignity
irrespective of religion, ethnicity, sex, and gender; human rights and the
protection of minorities within minorities, especially women and homo-
sexuals; toleration and its limits; religious fanaticism, terrorism, and
violence; and security and public order. Within these debates, a strong
stance is forwarded that the constitutive values of European democra-
cies inherited from the Enlightenment – in the present case (in casu),
the political ideal of freedom of speech – are non-negotiable irrespective

35
36 Anders Berg-Sørensen

of economic, social, and political consequences. And the crucial role of

Enlightenment discourse for European societies – emphasizing the sepa-
ration of religion and politics, equal civil rights and liberties, religious
toleration and mutual respect – is framed in opposition to the dark-
ened minds of the religious peoples demanding to be treated specially as
religious people. Hence, the Enlightenment seems to be reawakened in
terms of a reiteration of the Enlightenment critique of religion and the
eventual abuse of power in the name of religion.
Such cases seem to provide evidence of religion having become more
visible in the public sphere and having come to play an increasing role
in political life in European democratic regimes. As indicated above,
however, the challenge of religion in democratic politics has been
met by counter-reactions criticizing the increasing role of religion in
the public sphere and political life. The political doctrine of secularism
plays a special role in this reawakening of the Enlightenment heritage in
the encounter with religious forces. The political doctrine of secularism
claims the separation of religion and politics and, thus, constitutes
the guidelines for regulating religious people. So that which could be
labelled the secularist movement in European public discourse emphasizes
the political ideals of the Enlightenment, especially the separation of
religion and politics and the equal civil rights and liberties, such as the
individual freedoms of conscience and of expression as crucial pillars
in a democratic society that has the use of reason as modus operandi.
Furthermore, the secularist movement points out the dangers of the
irrational passions of religion urging religious movements into anger
and violence as well as focusing on the totalitarian dangers of mixing
religion and politics into political religions and totalitarian politics in
radical Islam and Christian fundamentalism with reference to the twen-
tieth-century European experiences with totalitarianism. In other words,
the secularist movement reawakens the Enlightenment critique of reli-
gion and the eventual abuse of power in the name of religion while at
the same time highlighting various dimensions of the Enlightenment
heritage.
However, the political doctrine of secularism is met with the critique
that, in regulating religion in the name of secularism by separating reli-
gion and politics, the political ideals of secularism become undermined.
The secular regulation of religions represents a use of power that, para-
doxically, could be characterized ‘political-theological’; in regulating
religion, the secular state operates as a political-theological authority
that transgresses the border between public and private and imposes
norms of how to behave and reflect on oneself as religious people living
 Reawakening Enlightenment? 37

in a democratic regime. Thus, the Enlightenment critique of the use and

abuse of power is turned upside down and directed against the use of
power in the name of secularism.
Engaging these insights, the aim of this chapter is to (a) reconstruct
the contestation of the Enlightenment heritage in European public
discourse with focus on the Enlightenment critique of religion and
(b) discuss the implications hereof for the democratic ideals regarding
liberty and equality, tolerance, neutrality, and impartiality. The primary
focus will be on the secularist movement, taking the point of view that
even within this ‘movement’ there are various conceptions of secu-
larism. In other words, secularism is held to be a contested concept. This
refers to the principles of strict separation of religion and politics justi-
fied by the use of secular or public reasoning but also implies various
concrete institutions and policies regulating the religion-politics rela-
tionship, reiterating various contextual political traditions and cultures.
The meaning of secularism is ambiguous and, as such, also subject to
democratic negotiations drawing the line between religion and politics
and creating conceptions of legitimate and illegitimate points of view in
democratic governance rather than constituting the necessary presup-
position of democracy.
From this point of view, the chapter will end up sketching what is called
a critical secularism articulated in accordance with the Enlightenment
critique of religion as well as including some of the insights from the
critique of secularism. In other words, it seems plausible to talk about a
shift from critique of secularism to critical secularism.

Enlightenment critique of religion vs. religious

critique of Enlightenment

The reiteration of the Enlightenment critique of religion often consti-

tutes a simple opposition between religion and Enlightenment. The same
is the case with the reactions against the Enlightenment from various
religious angles. In other words, the one part represents the counterpart
as either a ‘fundamentalist’ religion or ‘fundamentalist’ Enlightenment.
However, the question is whether this religion-Enlightenment opposi-
tion, as articulated in European public discourse, provides an adequate
picture of the present religion-politics debate and whether this is a
fruitful and plausible approach to the problems at stake.
For instance, Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment scholar and author of
the three-volume opus magnum on European Enlightenment – Radical
Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), and Democratic
38 Anders Berg-Sørensen

Enlightenment (2011) – conceives the Dutch liberal politician of Somali

origins and author of the film manuscript to Submission, Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
as ‘an heir to Spinoza’1 and, thus, the tradition of radical Enlightenment.
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), author of the infamous Theological-Political
Treatise (published anonymously and banned in 1670), represents the
heretic taking all of the burdens of the inquisitor on his shoulders. He
was excommunicated at age 23 from his Sephardic Jewish community
because of his heretic thoughts and writings questioning the authority of
religions. Jonathan Israel describes the radical Enlightenment tradition
of Spinoza as an ‘overthrow of ‘superstition’, kingship, ‘priestcraft’, and
‘institutionalized social hierarchy’, replaced ‘by democracy, equality, and
individual liberty’ (Israel, 2006: 41). In that sense, Israel emphasizes the
opposition between religion and Enlightenment and what he conceives
as the associated overthrow of absolutist regimes’ religious-authorized
abuse of power by democratically legitimate powers with reference to
the political ideals of the Enlightenment. Israel emphasizes the ideals of
freedom and equality within the frame of a democratic regime of rule
of law.
In his sketch of the European Enlightenment traditions, Israel
distinguishes between the radical Enlightenment of, among others,
Spinoza versus the moderate Enlightenment of Locke and Voltaire. The
radical Enlightenment was an uncompromised defence of the general
Enlightenment ideals and values, whereas, according to Israel, the
moderate Enlightenment was intertwined with the absolutist political
regimes and religious institutions and denominations of the day. Thus,
the moderate Enlightenment compromised their own ideals. The picture
Israel draws adds more details to the religion-Enlightenment opposition
while at the same time reproducing this opposition framed as a distinc-
tion between radical and moderate Enlightenment. This is reflected
in the polemic exchange between Pascal Bruckner, Ian Buruma, and
Timothy Garton Ash (among others) that took place in the early spring
of 2007 (Ash, 2007; Bruckner, 2007; Buruma, 2007).
The focal point in this exchange was the influence of Ayaan Hirsi
Ali on the contemporary European debate on religion and politics,
especially Islam, on the basis of Buruma’s book, Murder in Amsterdam
(Buruma, 2006). Bruckner framed this in terms of either pro or contra
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and, thus, either for or against the Enlightenment critique
of religion and the universal values of human rights inherited from the
Enlightenment. Buruma and Ash, on the one hand, expressed their admi-
ration for Hirsi Ali’s defence of democracy and individual freedom but,
on the other, criticized her monolithic view on Islam. From both angles,
 Reawakening Enlightenment? 39

the crucial question became whether and how an Enlightened European

Islam could be possible, and they constituted conceptual chains between
the Enlightenment tradition and critique of religion, Biblical criticism
and the possibility of critical interpretations of the Qur’an, human
rights, liberty and equality, democracy, and toleration. In that sense,
the various dimensions of the Enlightenment critique of religion were
revitalized. However, these points of view were also forwarded as fierce
attacks on the other parts in the polemic, especially framed as an oppo-
sition between the principle of secularism giving priority to the French
model of secularism (laïcité) and the principle of multiculturalism in
accordance with British, Canadian, and Dutch models.
But what is at stake in this debate? Irrespective of their substantial
disagreement and polemic tone, Bruckner, Buruma, and Ash defend the
protection of individual rights and liberties against the use and abuse of
power, either by religious or political authorities, and they encourage
constitutive values, such as dignity and equality, freedom and self-de-
termination, democracy and rule of law, tolerance and mutual respect,
as crucial for the future European political communities. However, they
disagree on how to fulfil these ideals, the various models of secularism
and the implied rights and liberties, and how to understand and inter-
pret these models. This reflects their attitudes towards various inter-
pretations of the Enlightenment ideals and values. For instance, is free
speech considered a non-negotiable fundamental pillar of a democratic
regime, not to be questioned at all? Or is it a fundamental pillar in which
the interpretations of its meaning in application are open for delibera-
tion and contestation? In that sense, their respective interpretations of
the various models of secularism constitute the frame of their different
approaches to the actual problems of religion and politics.
Secularism is therefore the focal point in the rest of this paper, under-
stood as a political doctrine taking over the heritage of the Enlightenment
critique of religion and the Enlightenment political ideals and values.2
Furthermore, the disagreement over the interpretation of the various
models of secularism points towards the potential insight to be found in
the present European debates on religion and politics.

Secularism and its critics

In the dominant discourses, secularism constitutes the lens through

which the religion-politics relationship is conceived (cf., e.g. Audi, 2011a,
2011b; Habermas, 2006; Taylor, 1998). Secularism forms a vocabulary
and scheme of thought claiming the separation of religion and politics
40 Anders Berg-Sørensen

as institutional arrangement and individual reason: Political institutions are

to be organized in such a manner that they are independent and free of
religion, and this organization of the political realm is justified by the use
of secular or public reason. In other words, organizing a neutral polit-
ical realm and taking impartial political decisions based on commonly
accessible reasons requires the translation of religious beliefs and convic-
tions into a common political language and, thus, not taking them into
consideration. The dominant discourses of secularism, in terms of the
institutional arrangement and individual reason, separate religion and
politics for the purpose of the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and toler-
ance, equality and impartiality, neutrality, and universality.
As mentioned above, however, secularism is a contested concept, and
it seems more plausible to refer to secularism in the plural than in the
singular. The understanding of secularism in the plural focuses on the
various dimensions in which secularism operates, especially the inter-
action between institutionalization and identification within concrete
political contexts. A further part of this multi-dimensional under-
standing of secularism is that the discourses of secularism operate as
various forms of power ranging from abstract principles to concretely
embodied points of identification.
Furthermore, the political doctrine of secularism is caught up in various
paradoxes: the ambition of universality reflects the particular norms of
political communities, political institutions, or political strategies; the
ambition of inclusion in the name of liberty and equality, neutrality
and impartiality, and by the use of ethical reasoning, excludes at the
same time the perspectives that challenge the dominant interpretation
of these norms and, thus, undermines the very norms themselves.
Talal Asad’s critique and other critiques of secularism point out how
discourses of secularism paradoxically operate by political-theologizing
as a specific form of power (cf. Anidjar, 2006; Asad, 2006, 2008; Hurd,
2008; Mahmood, 2006). A reading of the headscarf debates in, for
example, Denmark and France underlines this idea at first glance. In
both Denmark and France, it is possible to identify a politics of secu-
larism operating as a political-theological authority mixing up reli-
gion and politics, political theology, and secularism. In the Danish
case, a religious secularism in terms of a Danish Lutheran secularism
(Berg-Sørensen, 2010b), while in France, a principled secularism with
reference to the absolute sovereignty of the French state based on the
principle of secularism (laïcité).
Let us return to Asad in order to understand his approach better. In
analysing the French headscarf affair as a case in which the French
 Reawakening Enlightenment? 41

principle of secularism (laïcité) was rearticulated as an authoritative

point of reference for regulating the Muslim citizenry, Asad inscribes
this principle in the history of the French state and its characteristics
from absolutism, that is, the absolute power of the sovereign state:

I want to suggest that the French secular state today abides in a sense
by the cuius regio eius religio principle, even though it disclaims any
religious allegiance and governs a largely irreligious society. In my
view, it is not the commitment to or interdiction of a particular reli-
gion that is most significant in this principle but the installation of
a single absolute power – the sovereign state – drawn from a single
abstract source and facing a single political task: the worldly care of
its population regardless of its beliefs. (Asad, 2006: 499)

Based on this understanding of the absolutist heritage still playing a

role in the contemporary French state, Asad includes the conception of
sovereignty formulated by Carl Schmitt: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on
the exception’ (Schmitt, 2005: 5).
It is claimed that the Republic treats all religions equally. But this does
not preclude its taking certain decisions that affect religion, although
religion may never intervene in matters of state. This asymmetry is, I
suggest, a measure of sovereign power.
Schmitt pointed out that sovereignty is the ability to define the excep-
tion. Laïcité is made up of exceptions, and it is the function of sover-
eignty to identify and justify them – to forestall thereby the Republic’s
‘disintegration’. But in view of the famous doctrine that France is ‘la
République une et indivisible’, it is not entirely clear how the fear of
‘disintegration’ relates to the singular, invisible state as opposed to
those many persons (officials and citizens) who represent it (Asad, 2006:
504–505). And he continues: ‘I want to suggest that that very exercise
of power to identify and deal with the exception is what subsumes the
differences within a unity and confirms Republican sovereignty in the
Schmittian sense’ (Asad, 2006: 507).
In the contested reception of Schmitt’s political theology, two crucial
elements are pointed out: his notion of sovereignty and the state of
exception just mentioned and his conceptual sociology – ‘all significant
concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological
concepts’ (Schmitt, 2005: 36). The latter expresses the Schmittian under-
standing of the permanence of the theologico-political. In his terms,
there is a structural analogy between, on the one hand, ancient and
medieval theological concepts and, on the other, modern political
42 Anders Berg-Sørensen

concepts emphasizing both the theological origins of political concepts

and the theologico-political horizon of politics. This leads to the first
crucial element of Schmitt’s political theology: his notion of sover-
eignty. The sovereign is the one who decides that there is state of excep-
tion and makes decisions within this state of exception. The sovereign
is both outside and inside this situation of choice; both higher than and
involved in as sovereign power. Sovereignty is a boundary concept, both
operating at the boundary and setting boundaries. In that sense, sover-
eignty is a theologico-political concept constitutive of modern politics
and the decision of the sovereign is the political act par excellence setting
the relationship between friend and enemy.
According to Asad, the French state operates continuously as a sover-
eign that defines exceptions that could threaten the order, unity, and
security of the Republic. In other words, the French state acts out of
fear by defining such threats, in casu by defining religious symbols
as threats to the French public order. This emphasizes the point that
the French state acts by political-theologizing in the sense that, in the
headscarf ban, the state defines religion in order to operate within the
borders between religion and politics and the permitted spaces of reli-
gion and politics, respectively. Furthermore, this understanding of the
proper relationship between religion and politics is imposed on the
religious citizens: how they are to understand themselves in order to
be recognized as proper citizens able to make autonomous decisions
and free to choose their own ways of living and visions of a good life.
At this point, Asad adds Foucault’s conception of governmentality
to the Schmittian understanding of the sovereign use of power that
imposes a proper self-understanding on the citizens: they are to be
autonomous in order to be considered legitimate and, thus, the French
state governs the citizens ‘by letting them govern themselves’ (Asad,
2006: 521–522).
Asad’s analysis of how the French principle of secularism operates
as an exercise of power by political-theologizing in the concrete case –
defining the proper relationship between religion and politics, the sepa-
rate spheres of religion and politics based on a specific understanding of
religion articulated by the state representatives – provides crucial insights
into the power mechanisms of political secular principles. The question
is, however, whether the Schmittian conception of political theology
and sovereignty is the only available perspective on these mechanisms
and whether it is the most plausible.
First of all, Asad’s analysis of the French prohibition of religious signs
and symbols in public schools, in casu the Muslim headscarf (hijab),
 Reawakening Enlightenment? 43

reflects the tendency in European countries to propose legislation

prohibiting headscarves in various public institutions on the basis of
a stereotypical understanding of the meaning of the headscarf (i.e., the
suppression of Muslim women by a patriarchal religion and culture in
conflict with the secular ideals of liberty and equality). And the analysis
points out the paradox that the secular state itself suppresses these reli-
gious women and their religion because it does not listen to their voices
and include other possible meanings that could challenge the stereo-
typical understanding in deliberating and negotiating the legislation. I
follow Asad so far.
With reference to the Schmittian conception of political theology and
sovereignty, Asad draws a picture of the secular state as a united and
indivisible entity that gives priority to security issues masked as national
interest and acts out of fear against what are conceived as threats to the
public order. This is a picture of the secular state that Asad has reiter-
ated in other recent analyses, as in his analysis of the challenges that
Egypt meets after the democratic revolution in 2011–2012 (Asad, 2012).
However, by adopting this Schmittian conception of political theology
and sovereignty, Asad draws a picture of the secular state that has some
weaknesses, analytically and normatively. Asad has become so overly
focused on security issues that he only understands one possible motive
for political decisions and actions (i.e., fear) and therefore fails to pay
sufficient attention to the institutional complexity of a secular state and
the cultural pluralism of a secular society.
This critique of Asad’s image of the secular state and, thus, secularism
could be framed otherwise. One could claim that he – because of the
Schmittian conception of political theology and sovereignty – has
become too prejudiced in his conception of the secular state and secu-
larism which has closed a potential openness towards other concep-
tions and understandings. According to Asad, secularism is per definition
hostile towards religion, and it expresses this hostility by sovereign acts
of power out of fear and for reasons of security (cf. Asad, 2011, 2012).
Thus, in Asad’s vocabulary, the secular state and secularism have per
definition a negative sense. The consequence of this normative preju-
dice is that this negative sense of secularism is attached to Christianity,
democracy, and the nation-state per se because they are associated with
secularism and the secular state. However, these normative prejudices
block for his analytical programme of enquiring about various concrete
modes of secular formations and interactions between the secular and
the religious and the involved power mechanisms in, for example, a
democratic rule of power.
44 Anders Berg-Sørensen

Asad seems to recognize the potential plurality of perspectives at play

in the regulation of religion and politics in a democratic regime and,
thus, the ‘varieties of secularism’ (Asad, 2006: 526). However, he does
not draw the consequences in his analysis of the French headscarf affair
and general conception of the secular state, sticking to the Schmittian
conception of political theology and sovereignty. This has implications
for his conception of democracy in a plural society. Asad distinguishes
between ‘a democratic ethos’ and ‘a representative democracy’ as two
distinct and separate forms of democracy (Asad, 2011: 672). The demo-
cratic ethos includes the plurality of perspectives involved in democratic
deliberation, negotiation, and contestation, while the representative
democracy, according to Asad, is driven by the sovereign use of power
out of fear in order to protect the national interest. Because of this
narrow-minded conception of representative democracy along the lines
of the Schmittian conceptions of political theology and sovereignty,
Asad is unable to see any possible interactions between his two forms of
democracy. Thus, he neglects the democratic potentials of the plurality
of perspectives in the representative democratic institutions and proc-
esses. In the case of the French headscarf affair, he presents the Muslims
only as victims of the secular state, neglecting their democratic poten-
tials as ordinary citizens raising their democratic voices of disagreement
at the same time as they actually accepted the decisions made in the
representative democratic institutions; an acceptance that recognized
the democratic process as continually ongoing deliberation, negotia-
tion, and contestation and, thus, the possibility of another decision at
some time in the future.
Asad’s reference to Schmitt’s political theology reflects the vital role
that the German interwar dialogue on political theology plays in the
contemporary political thinking of religion and politics. Asad empha-
sizes how the secular state acts as a sovereign in the regulation of reli-
gious subjects, understood as public enemies. Paradoxically, the secular
state acts as a theological authority that subjectivates religious people.
However, this conception of political theology has been criticized by
those who pay attention to the normative restrictions on the sovereign
use of power, which points to other aspects of the interwar dialogues on
political theology and their revitalization in the contemporary debate
(cf. Berg-Sørensen, 2010a).
These debates in contemporary political theory on the relation-
ship between theology and political theory emphasize the processes
of reflecting and setting the boundaries between religion and politics;
and especially the various forms of interchange and interdependence
 Reawakening Enlightenment? 45

between the theological and religious spheres, on the one hand, and the
political sphere, on the other. A point of view that is common among
the various perspectives is the focus on the paradoxical situation that
when secular political theory repudiates theology and excludes the reli-
gious sphere from politics, it reproduces the authority that theology and
religion formerly had, in a negative or positive sense. In other words,
it is impossible not to include theological imaginations in thinking
of a secular political order that is supposed to be independent of reli-
gion. Furthermore, the debates point out the circumstance that it is not
that simple to establish an exclusively secular normative point of view
for justifying political obligations and restrictions in the use of power
without also including ethical points of view forwarded by various theo-
logical doctrines. In the present postsecular situation, Jürgen Habermas
and others argue that the secular state must take theology seriously, both
as a distinct form of knowledge – that is, as an academic discipline –
and as a religious authority constitutive of religious communities. This
represents a necessary shift in the secularist self-understanding of the
state in order to live up to the secular, democratic ideals of liberty and
toleration, equality and impartiality, neutrality, and universality.
In that sense, the debates addressing the boundaries between religion
and politics point out the critical potential of theology and political
theology in respect of the blind spots of secular political theory and
secular political regimes. In general, it is a critique of liberal democracy
and its focus on formal procedures, rights, and liberties. At the same
time, the various perspectives reflect upon the societal disintegrative
aspects of religious communities and the democratic dangers of political
theologies for modern democratic societies. Thus, the contemporary
debate on various conceptions of political theology adds an analytical
vigilance towards the masking of power exercises in political processes
regulating the citizenry.
However, this raises some questions regarding Asad’s application of
Schmittian political theology and the associated conception of sover-
eignty in his analysis of the discursive power of secularism: Has the
secular use of power by political-theologizing the absolute character
ascribed by Asad? Or would it be more productive to focus on the rela-
tional and contingent character of the various secular powers and the
ambiguity and contestation at play in the interpretation and application
of various traditions and cultures of secularism? This insight, empirical as
well as theoretical, might call for other conceptions of political theology
in order to better understand the various political processes of regulating
the citizenry by principles of secularism.
46 Anders Berg-Sørensen

Enlightenment critique and critical secularism in a

postsecular age

If Enlightenment critique of religion is about criticizing the use and

abuse of power in the name of religion and the institutional and cultural
conditions making this exercise of power possible, one could claim that
the multi-dimensional approach sketched in the last section is a further
development of the Enlightenment critique of religion reflecting the
political ideals of Enlightenment. However, this approach is a critique of
power in concreto rather than a critique of religion per se. It gives priority
to the political in so far as the political constitutes the conditions for
the exercise of power and, thus, is articulated within the frame of secu-
larism granting priority to politics over religion, but secularism in a
postsecular age in which the religious and political spheres are mixed
and in interaction and transformation rather than upholding a distinct
opposition between secularism and religion or political theology (cf.,
e.g. Lilla, 2007).
Think of Jürgen Habermas’s work on the postsecular society, where he
reconsiders a secular awareness of the moral, social, and political influ-
ence of religions and associates this awareness with a contested but ‘crit-
ical overcoming of ... a narrow secularist consciousness’ (Habermas, 2006:
16). This means that there is no teleological societal evolution towards a
secular society. This is reflected in attitudes towards religious people. Take
a step further and relate this postsecular sensitivity to the point forwarded
that secularism – as a contested and contestable concept – is also subject
to democratic negotiations drawing the line between religion and poli-
tics and creating conceptions of legitimate and illegitimate points of
view in democratic governing (cf. Freeden, 1996, 2004, 2005). Within
this frame of the democratic implications of conceiving secularism a
contested and contestable concept, one could include the reflections of
Rogers M. Smith on the contested and contestable character of ‘stories of
peoplehood’, writing: ‘I seek to check their dangers while also energizing
politics by calling for a politics of contestation among multiple stories of
peoplehood, both more particularistic and more universalistic’ (Smith,
2003: 15). The postsecular sensitivity implies an openness towards the
plural forces that energize politics and, thus, emphasizes the democratic
gain by committed contestation without neglecting the violent dangers
of political struggles. If one presumes that articulations of secularisms
are ‘stories of peoplehood’, then they could operate as ongoing reflec-
tions regarding the politics–religion distinction that imply an awareness
of the contingency and the fallibility of one’s own perspective. In other
 Reawakening Enlightenment? 47

words, we have – potentially – to do with various secularisms taking the

postsecular condition seriously in their own modesty (cf., e.g. Gorski
et al., 2012; De Vries, 2006).
Thus, this chapter presents an alternative secularism rather than an
alternative to secularism (cf. Bhargava, 2006). Going through the crucial
insights from the critique of secularism – especially the focus on the
multi-dimensional exercise of power – the chapter takes the stance of
what could be called critical secularism. A critical secularism creates a
movement backwards and forwards between the contextual analyses of
secularisms and the normative dimensions of secularism reflecting the
Enlightenment political ideals (cf. Laborde, 2008). The final section
sketches some vague ideas about the future of secularism in a postsecular
age under the label of critical secularism. Crucial is the multi-dimensional
use of power that the critique of secularism has pointed out. However,
in order to understand this multi-dimensional use of power in concreto,
the Schmittian notion of political theology emphasizing the creation
of oppositions between friend and enemy, between the secular and the
religious, with an evaluative point taken from the perspective of the
religious subject, seem to reduce the plurality of possible conceptions of
political theology and narrows down the scope of political and demo-
cratic potentials. The critique of secularism brings crucial insights to the
fore but ends up in an either-or deadlock of simple oppositions that it
aimed at dissolving itself.
What is to be brought back in is the contestation among a plurality
of perspectives on the relationship between religion and politics, such
as the various perspectives of secularism (cf. Connolly, 1999, 2005). The
contestation includes moments of critique: both critique of the other
perspectives in the interpretation and application of secular principles of
liberty and equality and critique of one’s own perspective in terms of an
awareness of its fallibility. In that sense, the critical vigilance of a critical
secularism adopts the point of view that everything can be questioned
and subjected to deliberation and contestation, whether interpretations
of political principles, organizations of political institutions, ideas and
values taken for granted in a religious or national culture and tradition,
or values enhanced with deep existential meaning by the ordinary citi-
zens. The crucial point is that such critical vigilance goes both ways and
includes both the other and oneself.
Thus, a critical secularism pursues the political ideals of the
Enlightenment – liberty and equality, tolerance, and impartiality. They
constitute the political vision of a critical secularism. At the same time,
a critical secularism adopts the Enlightenment critique of religion – not
48 Anders Berg-Sørensen

a critique of religion as such, but a critical vigilance towards the concrete

use and abuse of power in the name of religion – and it extends this
critical insight to the eventual use and abuse of power in the name
of secularism by pointing out the various dimensions of the exercise
of power from formal institutions and regulations to informal points
of identification, self-reflection and -understanding, and embodied
experiences and dispositions. In other words, a critical secularism is
a self-critical secularism. From this point of view, a critical secularism
gives priority to the political over the religious; the political in the
specific sense of an ongoing democratic contestation and negotiation
between a plurality of perspectives and points of view on deep existen-
tial matters as well as common affairs.
This emphasis on the relationship between plural democracy and crit-
ical secularism brings us back to the question of separation. It has been
claimed that the separation of religion and politics is impossible with
reference to all of the historical and current examples in which religious
and political institutions are intertwined, even in states without an
established church. However, these factual references do not necessarily
undermine the political vision of secularism – that a separation of reli-
gion and politics in terms of institutions provides better conditions for a
plural democratic society giving all plural perspectives equal weight and
freedom – rather, they indicate that there is still a long way to go and
that realizing the political ideals of secularism in contemporary society
requires hard work.
The reason why it makes sense to give priority to the political over
the religious and claim a separation of religion and politics at the
institutional level is, then, that it is more likely that secularism as an
institutional arrangement will provide an equal weight and freedom
to all citizens, irrespective of religious, philosophical, and metaphys-
ical belonging, than an established relationship between religious and
political institutions, which will give priority to majority cultures and
embedded national traditions and institutions. The institutional sepa-
ration, therefore, forms the basis of democratic political processes in
a plural society, where various perspectives are engaged in common
endeavours. The institutional separation does not necessarily imply a
demand on the mode of reasoning and justifying political decisions as
in the dominant political doctrine of secularism; rather, it involves proc-
esses of contestation and negotiation between the various perspectives.
The approach emphasizes the actual political thinking in terms of
diverse narrative strategies and the points of identification involved
 Reawakening Enlightenment? 49

in the concrete political processes (cf. Freeden, 2005, 2008) rather

than understanding democracy in terms of rational reconstructions of
universal premises for collective decision-making and presupposing the
separation of religion and politics in legitimate democratic reasoning
by requiring the translation of religious points of view and convictions
into a supposed universal political language as assumed in the domi-
nant normative political theory. Normatively, one focuses on the demo-
cratic negotiations reflecting principles of equal basic rights and liberties
but involved in various political processes reflecting and reiterating
different contextual institutional and cultural characteristics. In other
words, it outlines the normative implications not in terms of established
criteria for collective decision-making but as the social imaginations and
forces involved in the political decision-making processes, where plural
perspectives and reasoning are encountering each other in deliberation,
negotiation, and contestation.
Secularism is a contested concept. Even the normative principles of
secularism are open for different interpretations in the ongoing political
processes. The conflicts of interpretation cannot be settled by moral phil-
osophical justification. Within this frame, the religion-politics relation-
ship is subject to continuous democratic negotiations between diverse
perspectives and reasoning and, thus, as an ambiguous and unstable
relationship the categories of secular and religious could be mixed up
in the processes of governing and authorizing the use of power. In that
sense, a critical secularism contributes with a critical edge for under-
standing the establishment of closing rather than opening tendencies in
the production of normative criteria and principles for regulating reli-
gion and politics (cf. Keenan, 2003).
The key question regarding the normative implications for democ-
racy of a critical secularism is, then, whether the political processes are
kept open and give space to diverse narrative strategies and points of
identification that constitute the actual societies over which collective
decisions are made or whether they are dominated by a single narra-
tive strategy reducing the field of political deliberation, negotiation,
and contestation with reference to an unambiguous authoritative set of
vocabularies and institutions, including the political use of simple oppo-
sitions such as the clash of civilizations thesis or the religious-secular
divide. Thus, the focal point of the democratic question is the tension
between closing and opening tendencies and the degrees of contesta-
tion, critique, and self-critique in the political processes. This is where a
critical secularism can begin.
50 Anders Berg-Sørensen

Notes
An earlier version of this chapter has been presented at the Political Theory
Seminar at the Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania,
October 2012; in the Political Theory Group at the Annual Meeting of the Danish
Political Science Association, October 2012; and in the Political Theory Seminar
at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, November
2012. I would like to thank the participants for their comments and questions,
especially Signe Blaabjerg Christoffersen, Hans Boas Dabelsteen, Torben Bech
Dyrberg, Jeffrey E. Green, Nancy Hirschmann, Lis Højgaard, Carsten Bagge
Laustsen, Anne Norton, Tore Vincents Olsen, Christian F. Rostbøll, Rogers M.
Smith, and Lars Tønder. I would also like to thank the editors of this volume for
their valuable comments and constructive criticism.
1. Quote from Buruma (2006: 24).
2. The notion of secularism is to be distinguished from secularization.
Secularism is a political doctrine claiming the separation of religion and
politics from the point of view of political ideals of liberty and toleration,
equality and impartiality, neutrality and universality, whereas secularization
refers to historical and social processes of rationalization, social differentia-
tion, privatization of religion, and the decline of religious faith (cf. Asad,
2003; Casanova, 2006; Norris and Inglehart, 2004). However, some point
towards the implicit normative goal of secularism framing the theories of
secularization, so even a clear-cut distinction like the one just made hides
the normative ideals implicit in secularization theories (Asad, 2003; Jakobsen
and Pellegrini, 2008).

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3
(Pro)claiming Tradition: The
‘Judeo-Christian’ Roots of
Dutch Society and the Rise of
Conservative Nationalism
Ernst van den Hemel

From burgeoning EU scepticism in Great Britain,1 to criticism of Islam and

multiculturalism in Belgium,2 Germany,3 France,4 and the Netherlands,
the appeal to ‘Judeo-Christian’ roots of Western societies has been part
of the rise of conservative nationalisms all over Europe. If the ‘postsec-
ular’ at its very basis indeed signals a renewed place for religion in polit-
ical debates, conservative nationalists have proven to be more effective
postsecularists than their counterparts. By discussing uses of the phrase
Judeo-Christian in Dutch political debates, this article aims to investi-
gate the successful mixture between neoconservatism and the postsec-
ular invocation of religious roots that, as I will argue, plays an important
role in the current transformation of Dutch society. I will conclude by
suggesting a number of vistas for research that can contribute to the
debate surrounding the religious roots of Dutch identity.
It is an undeniable fact that the Netherlands is undergoing funda-
mental changes. The change of a tolerant progressive country to a
country that has been at the forefront of a turn to the right in European
politics is beginning to hit home, slowly but surely changing the inter-
national image of the Netherlands. This ‘turn to the right’ in Dutch
politics has been often debated (cf., for instance, Buruma, 2007). Less
often, however, do we find discussions of how the rise of populist right-
wing politics, and its infamous hardliner stance on Islam, has, from
the very start, been connected to a reappraisal of religious identity of
Dutch society. As I will show, classical Dutch values such as tolerance,
secularism, gay rights, and feminism have been reframed as secular, yet

53
54 Ernst van den Hemel

Judeo-Christian accomplishments are perceived to be in need of protec-

tion from threats – most notably, the threat that is Islam.
Let us take a look at the simultaneous start of the tumultuous inte-
gration debate as well as of invocation of Judeo-Christian roots as the
basis of Dutch society. I choose to take as the beginning 1991, when the
leader of the Dutch liberal party, Frits Bolkestein, stated the following
in his lecture entitled ‘De integratie van minderheden’ (The integration
of minorities):

Rationalism, humanism and Christianity have, after a long history

that includes many black pages, brought forth a number of funda-
mentally important political principles, like the separation of Church
and State, freedom of speech, tolerance and non-discrimination.
(Bolkestein, 1992)5

Bolkestein continues by stating that these universal values have shaped

Dutch culture, whereas other cultures, most notably ‘Islamic culture’ do
not contain these values and are therefore inherently less compatible
with Dutch society. Bolkestein states that, as a result, conceptualizations
of Dutch culture as open and tolerant to all should be re-evaluated. In
Bolkestein’s analysis, ‘multiculturalists’ have entertained the dream that
these universal values could ‘accommodate everyone’; reality in Dutch
society, however, ‘has proven otherwise’. Bolkestein states that if the
Netherlands wants to remain the liberal, tolerant country it has become,
a harder, more combative stance needs to be taken up. Which means:
tougher rules concerning integration, less immigration (predominantly
less immigration from ‘Islamic countries’), and a renewed emphasis on
national identity of which Judeo-Christianity is an integral part.
This article can be seen as the beginning of the infamous integration
debate that has drastically changed the Dutch political landscape, and
it can be seen as a precursor to a conservative turn in many Western
European countries. It is worth pointing out that, for Bolkestein,
emphasis on a tougher stance on immigration and Islam is inherently
connected to an affirmation of the religious identity and religious past
of the Netherlands, and, by extension, the West. In his argumenta-
tion, Bolkestein repeats the mainstream narrative of secularization:
Christianity (I will speak of the disappearance of the ‘Judeo’ part of the
expression below) has led to liberal values as freedom of speech, toler-
ance, and non-discrimination. It is also not surprising in this respect
that Bolkestein mentions humanism and rationalism as rising up out of
Christianity. Yet, at the same time, Bolkestein states that the traditional
 (Pro)claiming Tradition 55

telos of this myth, an all-inclusive multiculturalist community, is now

in urgent need of redefinition: for Bolkestein, the presence of a large
number of immigrants that do not subscribe to these basic values
makes clear that these values should be defended and grounded in a
particular religious identity. Speaking as a politician from a liberal party,
this entailed a change of important dogmas of liberalism: neutrality of
religion being the most important point of contention. The lecture of
Bolkestein functions as an early example of a particular political prac-
tice that would be copied by Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders, and a host
of neoconservative and liberal thinkers. This essay, I suggest using the
adjective ‘postsecular’ to describe this strategy.
The term ‘postsecular’, as the articles in this volume outline, is not a
concept that can be easily defined.6 It has been used to characterize a
period, a mode of doing politics, as well as a mode of criticizing the role
of religion in contemporary political debates (cf. Beckford, 2012). Yet,
at the very basis, most scholars agree that the term is connected to the
realization that the theory of secularization is no longer a valid way to
describe developments concerning religion in the Western world. The
eventual withdrawal of religion from the public sphere and its unavoid-
able decline in influence were once popular elements of the seculariza-
tion thesis, but now one would be hard-pressed to find scholars willing
to defend it. Instead religion returned to the agenda in more ways than
one. Critics of secularism have pointed out that, for instance, even the
universal agenda characteristic of the secularization thesis might be the
continuation of Protestantism under a different header (Asad, 1993;
Mahmood, 2005). This, however, does not mean that the term ‘post-
secular’ contains a clear critical agenda, nor that it is even clear how
one should proceed after the secularization thesis has shown itself to
be flawed. For instance, an influential phrasing of this predicament is
offered by Jürgen Habermas in his 2008 lecture ‘Notes on a Postsecular
Society’:

How should we see ourselves as members of a postsecular society

and what must we reciprocally expect from one another in order to
ensure that in firmly entrenched nation states, social relations remain
civil despite the growth of a plurality of cultures and religious world
views? (Habermas, 2008: 21)

Even though his attempt is to re-evaluate secularism’s normative claims

and to include morals that arise from religious traditions as poten-
tially valuable contributions to an inclusive public sphere, Habermas’s
56 Ernst van den Hemel

conceptualization of the postsecular has been criticized by those who

point out that his use of the notion nonetheless retains quite a lot of the
normative dimensions of secularism, and perhaps is not quite able to
reflect upon its own assumptions, with a potential bias as the result (cf.,
for instance, Jansen, 2011). Take the following quote, where ‘egalitarian
universalism’, an important ingredient of a civil and inclusive public
sphere, is explicitly connected to Judaic and Christian roots:

Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and

social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation,
of the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democ-
racy, is the direct heir of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian
ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the
object of critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day,
there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a
postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substances of
this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk. (Habermas,
2006: 150–151)

One could wonder whether the connection between egalitarian univer-

salism and a Judaic and Christian ethic does not pose severe challenges
to Habermas’s conceptualization of the postsecular public sphere.
To return to the question of defining the postsecular: As De Vries and
Sullivan have argued, postsecularism should perhaps not merely be seen
as ‘an attempt at historical periodization (following upon equally unfor-
tunate designations such as the ‘postmodern,’ the ‘post-historical,’ or
the ‘post-human’) but merely as a topical indicator for – well, a problem’
(De Vries and Sullivan, 2006: 2).
If the postsecular ‘problem’ is defined as the challenge to shape polit-
ical communities in a time when secular values have lost their neutrality,
and religion once again takes on an important role, the conservative
nationalists I will discuss have found a successful though not less prob-
lematic answer in their unequivocal proclamation that the foundation
of the secular West lies in its Judeo-Christian roots.
For, as I will show in what follows, it is interesting that many of
the academic criticisms levelled against the notion of the postsecular
(it would be exclusionary, too much focused on the West, too much
connected to secular ideals, and closed off to other conceptualizations
of the public sphere, to name but a few arguments), are acknowledged
by contemporary conservatives: the politicians and thinkers that I will
analyse in this article explicitly affirm that secularism is rooted in a
 (Pro)claiming Tradition 57

biased take on religion, and they simply affirm that the specific reli-
gious roots of secular values imply an exclusion of Islam from the public
sphere. In short, a lot of the criticism involved in the notion of post-
secularism is simply, yet very productively, embraced by conservative
nationalists all over Europe.
Before assessing the varied use of the appeals on Judeo-Christian
roots, it is worth summing up a number of their core characteristics.
First of all, these claims are, historically speaking, not very detailed:
references to a religious past are seldom combined with historical
evidence for, say, the connection between Judeo-Christian influences
and liberal values (Spruyt being an exception). References to a shared
theological unity or to confessional identity remain largely absent.7
Personal faith or religious experiences are usually fully absent from
these discussions. Nonetheless, as varied, vague, and paradoxical as
they may be, the appeals on Judeo-Christian roots nonetheless share a
number of aspects: First of all, the appeals are predominantly aimed at
the articulation of a national identity that arose out of a religious past.
Secondly, this identity is characterized by values traditionally associated
with secularism, such as the separation of church and state, freedom
of expression, gay rights, and feminism. Thirdly, the varied appeals to
this religiously informed secular identity share the sentiment that this
identity has come under threat from Islam and multiculturalists. As a
result, the secular values of Judeo-Christian Dutch society are perceived
to be in need of resolute defence. Finally, it is worth mentioning that
the appeals are not connected to an idealization of an actual existing
past. The twentieth century, with its pillarization, for instance, that
has been claimed by Abraham Kuyper as the Calvinist origin of Dutch
constitutional freedom and tolerance, does not function as a model
(Kuyper, 2008). The proponents of Judeo-Christian Dutch identity do
not propose a return to pillarized society.8
Progressive critics of this turn in Dutch politics have often pointed
at the incoherent, incorrect historical foundation for this appeal.
Furthermore, politicians who have gained electoral success by appealing
to the religious foundation of Dutch secular society have been criticized
as either employing a form of nostalgia to the past or as coyly introducing
a form of populist politics solely aimed at the ‘gut’ of the electorate.
Nonetheless, as I will attempt to show, these appeals are symptomatic
for a mode of doing politics that needs to be taken more seriously. This
particular appeal to religious roots of Dutch society problematizes the
old divide between secular, progressive politics, on the one hand, and
conservative, confessional politics, on the other.
58 Ernst van den Hemel

This can be illustrated by election results: In spite of the returned

emphasis on religious roots and the supposed return of religion,
Christian-Democratic parties are in steady decline. But, at the same time,
this does not seem to be connected to ongoing secularization of politics
either. As a study by Grotenhuis and others of the results of the main
Dutch Christian-Democratic party CDA has shown, the decimation of
seats of the CDA is not connected to a simultaneous decline in numbers
of religious voters (Grotenhuis et al., 2012). Grotenhuis et al. claim that
church-going voters did not leave the CDA because of a demise of the
role of religion in politics. Rather, Grotenhuis suggests, the simultaneous
rise of political parties that have claimed to embody Judeo-Christian
values might point to voters believing that Judeo-Christian values are
upheld more effectively by the New Right than by classical confessional
parties. The decline in votes for CDA is contemporary to the rise of
votes for parties that explicitly claim to defend Judeo-Christian values
of Dutch society. The decline of Christian-Democratic politics and the
rise of New Right appeals to Judeo-Christian values could therefore be
seen as part of a change in the way religion functions in politics: as the
decline of the CDA showed, voters moved from confession-based poli-
tics to postsecular politics. Without wanting to delve deep into details
of voter behaviour, this example illustrates the point that the perceived
return to Judeo-Christian roots is of a different, more complex nature
than the narratives of a return of traditional confessional politics allow.

‘Judeo-Christian roots’: history and rise

It is important to realize that this particular use of the term Judeo-

Christian, denoting a combination of religious history with universal
secular values, is relatively recent. It is only at the end of the twentieth
century that this use of the term arises. Before delving further into the
specifics of its contemporary use in the Netherlands, it is worthwhile to
briefly recap some of the major moments in the history of the term (see
also Wallet, 2012).
The first explicitly political use, that I am aware of, was in the work of
Voltaire who used it to extend his critique of religion to all Abrahamic
religions. In his Dictionnaire Philosophique, Voltaire wrote of ‘du fanatisme
judéo-chretien’, in which the typical Judeo-Christian fanatic is described
as follows: ‘he who experiences ecstasy, visions, he who mistakes
dreams for reality and his imagination for prophesy, this person is a
novice fanatic, who before long will be ready to kill for his love of God’9
(Pomeau and Le Roy Ladurie, 1994: 97). The Judeo-Christian tradition,
 (Pro)claiming Tradition 59

being a theology of revelation has a penchant for fanaticism and reli-

giously motivated violence. Voltaire’s deism is meant to be a replace-
ment for this tradition, removing its belief in supernatural events and
replacing it with a tolerant, rational religion, untroubled by a God who is
now conceptualized as someone who does not interfere in earthly affairs
(Toscano, 2010). Incidentally, without wanting to take a stand in the
debate whether Voltaire was an anti-Semitic writer, the ‘Judeo’ in Judeo-
Christian is consistently used by Voltaire to identify the worst of the two
forces: ‘The Jews had God Himself for master; see what has happened to
them on that account: nearly always have they been beaten and slaves,
and today do you not find that they cut a pretty figure?’ (Pomeau and
Le Roy Ladurie, 1994: 97).
Friedrich Nietzsche equally used the term to criticize the limitation of
the individual in Abrahamic religions. He used the term in his Anti-Christ
(1895) in a way that strongly linked the phrase ‘Judeo-Christian’ to slave
morality: ‘ressentiment morality ... this is the Judeo-Christian morality
through and through’ (Nietzsche, 2008: 21). For Nietzsche, then, the
term Judeo-Christian meant the shared history of sacrificing the indi-
vidual to a transcendental authority. Judeo-Christian furthermore testi-
fies to the illegitimate fusion of philosophy with theology, as well as a
departure from the natural state of affairs. Also, again without wanting
to participate in the debate whether or not Nietzsche was an antisemitic
author, it is worthwhile to point out that also for Nietzsche the ‘Judeo’
part of the term usually is seen as even worse than the ‘Christian’. Or, as
Nietzsche states, ‘the Christian is only a Jew of a ‘more liberal’ persua-
sion’ (2008: 44).
But the term did not function as a positive adjective also in circles less
hostile to monotheism: In an influential Hegelian theological school
in the nineteenth century (the Tübingen school), the term was used to
indicate a phase in the early history of Christianity, where elements of
Judaic religion and early Christianity were still connected. It frequently
had an overtone of impurity, of transition from a state of impure trib-
alism to pure, universal Christian belief. Ferdinand Christian Baur,
for instance, emphasized in 1836 that in early Christianity, a conflict
existed between Pauline universal Christianity, and Petrinist ‘Judeo-
Christianity’ that wanted to ground Christianity in a particular identity
(Baur, 1836). In this stage the ‘Judeo’ in Judeo-Christian was associated
with an old-fashioned clinging to a tribal past that blocked the devel-
opment of a universal religion. Judeo-Christian was the moniker of an
imperfect moment in a dialectical development that moved towards
purification and towards the end of history (Silk, 1984).
60 Ernst van den Hemel

As these examples show, the hyphen connecting Judeo and Christian

was generally not seen as a positive thing, and tended to tie the term to
a flaw in history, where Judaism denoted the lowest and most reproach-
able part of the equation.
The term received positive connotations in its use in the United
States in the 1930s, when it was used to mobilize the American popula-
tion against fascist antisemitism in the 1930s (Healan Gaston, 2012).
Dwight D. Eisenhower stated in 1941: ‘Our form of government has
no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t
care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept but
it must be a religion that all men are created equal’ (Silk, 1984: 65).
The term was used to rally a population against an enemy (fascism),
by binding together previously disparate elements in a community
(Jews and Christians) whose values are based on a notion of equality.
Furthermore, in Eisenhower’s statement, it was proclaimed that religion
is a necessary background for a government that safeguards equality.
Eisenhower, furthermore, moves away from actual theology, and moves
towards a broad religious inspiration for political order that Robert
Bellah has named ‘post-traditionalist civil religion’ (Bellah, 1991). This
use was continued in the era of the Cold War, where the term was used
to denote a mixture of democracy, liberalism, and capitalism bundled
up with reference to multi-denominational devout faith and American
traditionalism. Here the Judeo-Christian heritage was used as a term
that identified the ‘us’ versus ‘the enemy’ (i.e., communism), in order
to ‘deny the atheistic and materialistic concepts of communism with
its attendant subservience of the individual’ (Domke and Coe, 2008:
15). This was an important moment in forging the alliance between
conservative thinkers and evangelical Christians that can still be seen in
the Republican party today: the electoral victory of Ronald Reagan was
largely made possible by the alliance between conservatives and evan-
gelical Christians who found common ground in the shared project of
fighting godless communists and liberal licentiousness, while retaining
a connection to the modern life of the average American individual
(Corey, 2011; Steinfels, 1980).
Finally, in the transition from the Cold War era to the ‘End of
History’, as exemplified in the works of Wilders (2007b), Huntington
(2004) and Francis Fukuyama (2007), the term started to denote a
shared set of values that set the modern secular West over and against
non-secular and non-modern Islam. In his famous essay ‘The Clash of
Civilizations?’ published in 1993, Huntington quotes Bernard Lewis
approvingly:
 (Pro)claiming Tradition 61

We are facing a meed and a movement far transcending the level of

issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no
less than a clash of civilizations – the perhaps irrational but surely
historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian
heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.
(Huntington, 1993: 32)

This final stage of the term arises in the 1990s. The clash of civilizations
rhetoric came to a climax in the aftermath of 9/11. Currently the emphasis
on ‘Judeo-Christian heritage’ still most often means a conservative affir-
mation of secular, Western values, and, more specifically, the exclusion of
intolerant Islam.
In short, the term Judeo-Christian as a positive, shared, cultural frame-
work expressing the religious background of secular values should be
seen as a relatively recent invention. In this sense, current use stands in
contrast with the political history of the term, where Judeo-Christianity
was frequently seen as an obstacle on the way to universal ideals.
However, a sense of continuation of history can be identified as well.
All throughout its history, the term Judeo-Christian, far from neutrally
describing a set of religious-cultural affinities, or historical facticity, has
been a fighting term – a term explicitly used to divide as much as to
identify, to attack as much as to defend. I emphasize ‘explicitly’ because,
in the eyes of its propagators, the politics of use of the term seems to be
more important than its historical accuracy. Having made this historical
detour, we can now zoom in on this politics of use, by focusing on the
Dutch context.

Dutch Judeo-Christian roots

In Dutch political debates, starting at the end of the 1990s and peaking
halfway through the first frequently decade of this millennium, the
Judeo-Christian roots of Dutch society are invoked to defend secular,
liberal values against the threat of intolerant non-secular Islam, and to
make a claim that the particular identity of the Netherlands should not
be subsumed under either multiculturalist relativism or supranational
EU bureaucracy. To take perhaps the most controversial example: In
2004, the successful populist right-wing politician Geert Wilders offered
his reaction to the news that in the (then) newly appointed cabinet two
functionaries with Islamic backgrounds would be installed:

I want us to affirm the Leitkultur of the Netherlands in article 1 of

the constitution (that now expresses equality and outlaws discrimination,
62 Ernst van den Hemel

evdh). Our dominant values are based on the Jewish, Christian and
humanist tradition. We should be proud of that, because these values
express the foundations of who we are. And, in this way we can affirm
what we don’t want. We should not want a different culture, Islamic
culture, to rule over us. (Wilders, 2011)10

The interviewer continues by asking whether this is similar to what the

Christian-Democrat-led cabinet proposes: Isn’t this appeal similar to the
classic Christian-Democratic emphasis on morality and shared values?
Wilders replies by explicitly rejecting the ‘sphere sovereignty’, a clas-
sical concept in pillarization theory, where every group in society has a
certain autonomy in their own ‘sphere’. In Wilders’s view, this theory
places insufficient emphasis on the shared cultural identity that should
bind different groups together in Dutch society:

The Christian-Democrats got their ‘sphere sovereignty’: all notions of

communality have been institutionalized by this government. They
think the family is important, so they create a ministry for Youth and
Family Affairs. The word ‘together’ is mentioned about 10.000 times
in the coalition agreement of this government, but that doesn’t say
a single thing about what really binds people. We should launch a
debate about our cultural identity, but that is ignored completely by
(prime-minister) Balkenende. (Wilders, 2011)11

This interview is exemplary for many of the uses of the term ‘Judeo-
Christian roots’ in Dutch political debates: it signifies an emphasis on
the identity of a community, an identity that is under threat and that
should be reclaimed by defiantly insisting on its superiority. It further-
more breaches with hitherto commonly accepted means of giving these
roots a voice in the Christian-Democratic tradition. As such, it is a break
with what is perceived to be a failure, across the board, to address and
nurture this shared background.
In 2002, populist pioneer Pim Fortuyn had appealed in a similar sense
to the irreducible connection of secular values to their Judeo-Christian
roots:

Problems concentrate around all those fellow-citizens that originate

from areas that are culturally very different from us. In general we
can say that Islamic cultures are very different from areas that are
culturally speaking Judeo-Christian ... . Problems concerning integra-
tion and mutual acceptance are centered on the relation between the
 (Pro)claiming Tradition 63

dominant Judeo-Christian humanistic culture on the one hand and

Islamic culture on the other. I consciously speak in the broad termi-
nology of culture rather than of religion. One can leave a religion, as
we can see happening massively in our country, a culture however,
one cannot leave behind. (Fortuyn, 2002a: 83)12

It becomes clear that one needs to subscribe to a number of Judeo-

Christian values in order to participate in this debate in the public
sphere. Furthermore, it is clear that what is at stake here for Wilders,
Fortuyn, and Bolkestein is a culturalized notion of religion. To quote
Frits Bolkestein (1992):

The shared myth [of Christianity] is gone. And now the ques-
tion is whether we can function without that myth. ... we can say:
‘hurray! We are no longer Christian!’ but I wonder whether that atti-
tude will be sufficient. I’m afraid not. Some intellectuals converted
to Catholicism for that reason. For me that would be too artificial,
because I am not a religious person, but culturally speaking, I am
most certainly Christian.13

Frequently, these appeals have been criticized as mere populist rhetoric,

aimed at the gut of the electorate and violating historical accuracy and
decency in the process. I suggest that these appeals should not be seen as
irrational (or historically incorrect) politics but as part of a conservative
rhetorical practice that simultaneously:

● Aims to articulate that which underlies the core values of Dutch

culture (universal secular values);
● Emphasizes the serious threat to this culture (presence and influence
of ‘Islam’ in the Netherlands);
● Launches a criticism of the universal appeal of secular values and
argues against its neutrality; and
● Presents a need to insist on the non-neutrality of these values (by
insisting on the specific Judeo-Christian roots of these values).

Intriguingly, there is a historical specificity here. This means that the

entire liberal tradition, including tolerance and openness, should now
be defended in a conservative manner as being part of a single identity.
As Paul Cliteur, a leading liberal thinker in the Netherlands has quipped:
‘to be a liberal nowadays, you have to return to the roots, that means,
you have to be conservative’ (Standaard, 2004),14 or, in the words of
64 Ernst van den Hemel

conservative author and former ideologue of Geert Wilders, Bart Jan

Spruyt (2005): ‘conservatism is needed to prevent liberalism from killing
itself’.15
In this sense, classical progressive values can be connected to the
conservative emphasis on the protection of a national religious identity.
Both Fortuyn as well as Wilders explicitly connect feminism, gay rights,
tolerance, and anti-fascism to the Judeo-Christian tradition, whereas
Islam is perceived to be a sexist, homophobe,16 intolerant form of ‘desert-
fascism’. For these reasons, Wilders has launched a campaign to ban the
‘Mein Kampf of Islam’, the Koran, in 2007.17 For a convincing analysis of
this change in the status of progressive ideals, see Paul Mepschens and
Jan Willem Duyvendak’s analysis of the culturalization of citizenship
and the way in which homosexuality has been adopted as a conservative
nationalist value (Duyvendak and Mepschen, 2012). In their analysis,
they have shown how gay rights have been used to argue for the supe-
riority of Dutch national identity (‘homo-nationalism’). Similar anal-
ysis could be made regarding feminism, the critique of fascism, and a
number of other progressive ideals. Thus, paradoxically, values usually
associated with a secular outlook, or even an anti-religious attitude can
be presented as ‘proof’ of the superiority of Judeo-Christian culture.
On the one hand, this seems quite a paradoxical statement: secular
values are claimed as religious in origin, and gay rights are a Judeo-
Christian invention. Yet, if we see the appeal on Judeo-Christian roots
as a rhetorical tool, a linguistic act meant to invoke more than to
describe, we might find a new way of analysing this phenomenon. As I
will show, the use of the rhetorical invocation of a religious ground of
identity should be seen as a conservative strategy.18 All along the history
of conservatism, a mode of invocation can be identified that is quite
suitable to analyse the contemporary predicament. An illustration of its
rhetorical mode is useful to understand how such conservative procla-
mations provide a rhetorical foundation for national identity.

(Pro)claiming tradition

As I have showed above, Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘The Clash of

Civilizations?’ marked an important innovative moment in the history
of the term Judeo-Christian. Yet Huntington’s article is also a classical
example of what Huntington himself would call conservative rhetoric.
In his Conservatism as Ideology (1957), the same Huntington traces the
roots of conservatism to the affirmation that conservatism is above all:
‘the rationalization of existing institutions in terms of history, God,
 (Pro)claiming Tradition 65

nature, and man’ (Huntington, 1957). Moreover, as Huntington empha-

sizes, the conservative appeal to history is a fighting history:

The conservative ideology is the product of intense ideological and

social conflict. It appears only when the challengers to the estab-
lished institutions reject the fundamentals of the ideational theory
in terms of which those institutions have been molded and created.
(Huntington, 1957: 458)

This is, for Huntington, not so much connected to a certain position in

the division between left-wing and right-wing politics, but rather to a
mode of defence of what has been accomplished:

Just as aristocrats were the conservatives in Prussia in 1820 and slave

owners were the conservatives in the South in 1850, so the liberals
must be the conservatives in America today. Historically, American
liberals have been idealists, pressing forward toward the goals of
greater freedom, social equality, and more meaningful democracy.
The articulate exposition of a liberal ideology was necessary to convert
others to liberal ideas and to reform existing institutions continuously
along liberal lines. Today, however, the greatest need is not so much
the creation of more liberal institutions as the successful defense of
those which already exist. This defense requires American liberals to
lay aside their liberal ideology and to accept the values of conserva-
tism for the duration of the threat. (Huntington, 1957: 472–473)

In short, what Huntington saw as the pinnacle of conservatism is the

grounding of a community by appealing to its foundations in times of
struggle. Huntington emphasizes that its lack of ideological coherence
is in fact a strong point of conservatism. The coherence of the conserva-
tive tradition should be sought in its capacity to defend universal values
from attack.
This status of the appeal to tradition as an active construction in the
present has led some commentators to accuse conservatives of telling the
populace ‘noble lies’, of twisting the truth in order to mobilize popula-
tions into believing in a threat. This, for instance, has been an influential
discussion concerning criticism of the work of the influential conserva-
tive philosopher Leo Strauss as well. As many authors have explicitly
stated with regards to the rise of the neoconservative movement in the
United States, ‘Leo Strauss gave the ideological impetus to the Bush
years: his noble lies enabled people to believe in a notion of community
66 Ernst van den Hemel

and a notion of an enemy’ (Drury, 2005: xxiv). The notion ‘noble lie’
stems from Plato’s Republic (414b–414c) where Socrates proposes to tell
the citizens of the ‘ideal city’ a ‘noble myth’: the first part is the ‘myth
of autochthony’, that the people have an intrinsic connection to the
place they were born. The second part is the ‘myth of the metals’, stating
that the Gods mixed in valuable methods when each type of citizen
was made, rendering them beautiful and valuable. In this way, the ideal
society can be strengthened by a myth that is not true, but nonetheless
‘in the service of justice and truth’. It is the apparent embrace of Strauss
of the ‘noble lie’ that is often used to criticize Straussian influence for
portraying a false image of identity to the populace in order to manipu-
late public order. That makes people believe their birthplace is worth
more than the birthplaces of others. Specifically, Strauss is accused of
‘regarding religion merely as a political tool intended for the masses but
not for the superior few’ (Drury, 2004).
Written from a need to criticize the rise of neoconservatism in the
Bush years, this view of Strauss and of conservative politics in general
can be called biased, to say the least. Commentators have engaged in
a fierce debate over the accuracy of Drury’s claims (Minowitz, 2009).
Leaving that debate aside for the moment, allow me to point out that
the description of conservative appeals to religion as a ‘noble lie’, does
not reach the core of what I have outlined above as the rhetorical mode
characteristic of the conservative tradition: first of all, the word ‘lie’
implies the existence of truth. Whereas, it is might be more character-
istic of Strauss’s philosophy that ‘truth’ is not at stake in politics. For
Strauss does not so much endorse telling noble lies; rather, he exposes
and uses the rhetorical dimension underlying all constructions of iden-
tity. In a more astute and less partisan close reading of Strauss’s appeals
to tradition, John G. Gunnell emphasizes the rhetorical dimension of
the conservative emphasis on tradition:

In one place, Strauss argues that ‘only because public speech demands
a mixture of seriousness and playfulness, can a true Platonist present
the serious teaching, the philosophical teaching, in a historical and
hence, playful garb.’ My concern is not to conjecture about Strauss’s
true teaching, but to note the rhetorical function of the myth of the
tradition and the instrumental tasks served by this kind of argument.
In Strauss’s case, the account of the tradition may be employed as a
correlate to a philosophical argument, or as a surrogate when discur-
sive argument is inadequate, much as Plato employs mythohistorical
tales in his dialogues. (Gunnell, 1978: 133)
 (Pro)claiming Tradition 67

Rather than as a ‘noble lie’, Gunnell sees Strauss’s emphasis on tradition

and history as a ‘dramaturgical account’:

Strauss’s explication of the tradition of political philosophy is not a

research conclusion but a dramaturgical account of the corruption
of modernity designed to lend authority to his assertions about the
crisis of our time. It is an epic history, complete with epic formulae.
(Gunnell, 1978: 131)

Gunnell also stresses the particularly creative dimension of such a

theory:

The ‘tradition’ is a retrospective analytical construction which

produces a rationalized version of the past. It is a virtual tradition
calculated to evoke a particular image of our collective public psyche
and the political conditions of our age, if not the human condition
itself. It professes to tell us who we are and how we have arrived
at our present situation. ... What emerges is a historical drama, but
the import of any substantive version depends initially on the audi-
ence’s predisposition to accept the tradition as a reality. (Gunnell,
1978: 132)

A similar approach as Gunnell’s to the conservative rise in Dutch political

debates would be fruitful. For the conservative invocation of tradition,
as the grounding of identity in something else than rational, enlight-
ened truth can be seen as an inherent part of Dutch public debates as
well. Prominent conservative thinker Andreas Kinneging in his ‘Het
Conservatisme: Kritiek van de Verlichting en de Moderniteit’ places
himself squarely in the tradition of conservatism, and writes approv-
ingly of the role of religion as a foundation beyond (scientific) reason:

In general, we can say that the Christian intellectual tradition is

an indispensable source of knowledge and science, even if most of
what is expressed in this tradition cannot be proven scientifically.
(Kinneging, 2000)19

For Kinneging, the conservative appeal to tradition, which is also a

construction of that tradition, is not an accurate, scientific description
of what binds a community. As any introductory textbook to anthro-
pology will affirm, it is through the invocation of identity and that
which it excludes, that this identity is formulated. Bart Jan Spruyt,
68 Ernst van den Hemel

director of the Edmund Burke foundation and co-author of the first

political programme for Geert Wilders’s Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party
for Freedom, or PVV), describes the need to find opposition to Judeo-
Christian values in order to rediscover Dutch national identity. He refer-
ences Carl Schmitt and states that more so than describing what Dutch
society is, by proclaiming Dutch Judeo-Culture to be superior, ‘we’ will
find out what Dutch society has been all along:

Let’s hope that Schmitt was right when he stated that the enemy is
‘the figure of our own question’ and that in this confrontation we
rediscover our own identity. (Spruyt, 2005: 63)20

This incomplete sketch of the role of the appeal on religion in conserv-

ative thought serves to illustrate an important point: the appeal to
Judeo-Christian roots should be seen as a performative-linguistic act,
an invocation rather than a description, that has as its goal the simul-
taneous defence and construction of a community that is perceived to
be under threat, by appealing to a tradition that cannot be grasped in
rational, objective terms.

Progressive critics

Critics of the turn to the right in the Netherlands have had difficulty
in interacting with this mode of doing politics. Frequently, the role of
appeals to the religious dimension of Dutch society is misunderstood to
be either historically erroneous or old-fashioned. One telling example
is Rob Riemen, who in his De Eeuwige Terugkeer van het Fascisme (The
Eternal Return of Fascism) decries twenty-first century appeals to Judeo-
Christian norms as ‘the exact inverse of Judeo-Christian and humanist
traditions’: ‘What the PVV offers us in reality is diametrically opposed
to the Judeo-Christian and humanist traditions’ (Riemen, 2010: 45).21
Riemen states that the Christian tradition, known for its ‘profound
reflection’, ‘high cultural values’, and ‘respect for the individual’, is
taken hostage by ‘thugs’ that promote thoughtless and ruthless power
struggles. Interestingly enough, Riemen’s book reads like a reaffirmation
of Judeo-Christian-secular values over and against the populist fascists.
The main narrative that drives the postsecular appeal to religious roots,
that religious values are needed to safeguard to liberal values, is implic-
itly repeated here, but in a more elitist sense. The people have merely
been tricked into believing that hatred for Islam is part of Dutch culture,
whereas, in reality, Judeo-Christian culture is characterized by tolerance
 (Pro)claiming Tradition 69

and inclusivity. The question of the limits of tolerance, which fuels the
debate, is largely avoided.
A second reaction to the rise of conservative nationalism has been to
decry its appeals to Judeo-Christian norms as a return to confessional
politics. Jos de Mul has argued that, on the contrary, values like liber-
alism, secularism, and tolerance have been created not because of, but
in opposition to, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that any return to
these religious roots necessarily means a regress in development. We see
here a conceptualization of religion as diametrically opposed to secular
values (De Mul, 2011). De Mul does not address the driving force behind
these appeals to religious roots: the goal of these appeals, as we have
seen, is mostly to offer a foundation for these secular values because
they are perceived to be under threat. Again, secular values are presented
as much better than religious values, as a result, the question of the
perceived threat to the same secular values is largely ignored.
These two reactions to appeals to Judeo-Christian roots are sympto-
matic for the way in which progressive commentators fail to address the
core of, let alone offer an alternative to, the conservative performative.
This is problematic for a number of reasons: unqualified appeals to the
value of secular values are successfully taken up in narratives that equate
religion with the genesis and protection of these secular values. As a
result, the grounding of these values – the main drive behind conserva-
tive postsecular thought – remains largely undisputed. By missing the
point that what is at stake is an immanent construction of identity, the
‘debate’ about national identity is doomed to continue on two separate
tracks: one side invokes identity in a manner that addresses itself to
those who share the feeling that ground is lacking, whereas the other
side speaks in terms of historical accuracy and an outdated separation
between secular objectivity and religious dogmatism.
It is interesting that many of the academic criticisms levelled against
the notion of postsecularism (it would be exclusionary, too much focused
on the West, too much connected to secular ideals, and closed off to
other conceptualizations of the public sphere, to name but a few argu-
ments raised against conceptualizations of the postsecular), are actively
embraced by contemporary conservatives: the politicians and thinkers
mentioned above affirm explicitly that secularism is, in fact, based on
a biased take on religion; they simply affirm that this religious-secular
identity is a way to exclude Islam. In short, a lot of the criticism levelled
against the notion of postsecularism is actively embraced by its propo-
nents. Thus, like Hans Joas, De Vries, and Sullivan have argued, postsec-
ularism perhaps should not be seen as a historical periodization, but ‘a
70 Ernst van den Hemel

change in mindset of those who, previously, felt justified in considering

religions to be moribund’. It is from this realization that many of the
previously secular politicians have embraced Judeo-Christian values as
a foundation for an identity they have presented as being under attack.
And as the poor quality of the Dutch debate testifies, an answer to this
postsecular mode of doing politics has not yet been found.
At the moment of writing, Geert Wilders’s PVV is the largest in the
polls. If the recent polls are something to go by, the debates concerning
religion, secularism, and national identity will not fade away anytime
soon. Those who want to participate in this continuous recreation of
religious identity, have the task to catch up and learn to understand
postsecular politics. I will therefore conclude with some reflections on
some possible reactions to these conservative appeals on religion in the
public debate.

Conclusion: the postsecular demand

There exists a large gap between the political use of religion, which is
successful and effective, and the academic study of religion, which, in
this particular moment, institutionally speaking, is dwindling and strug-
gling to find its role in society. As Theology faculties in the Netherlands
make the transition to faculties of Religious Studies, the volatile reli-
gious climate poses an urgent challenge to scholars of religion. What
is the relevance of the study of religion in a time and a society that
makes religion into a central controversy? What role does the study of
Judaism or Christianity play in times when culturalized versions of these
belief systems play an important role in reframing Dutch culture? Some
thoughts on how the study of religion can become not just a relevant
contribution to but perhaps also an antidote to a volatile and divisive
political climate:

Criticism alone might not be enough. As an impressive volume by

Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood has
eloquently investigated, the critical subject might be a position tied in
close with secular notions of individuality (Asad et al., 2009). In what
I have attempted to describe above, many a Dutch commentator has
attempted to criticize the appeals to Judeo-Christian roots as histori-
cally inaccurate, or as nothing more than populism aimed at the
unintelligent masses who, if they would only listen, would distance
themselves immediately from this agenda the moment they found
out the truth. This runs the risk of missing the central performative
 (Pro)claiming Tradition 71

character of conservative rhetoric (and, perhaps, of constructions

of communities in general). A pitfall of this reaction to the rise of
conservative postsecular rhetoric is elitism, where historical accuracy
is divorced from, instead of reconnected with, the way in which the
past is mobilized in political debates. Instead, perhaps an answer lies
in affirming counter-histories and counter-identities.
Colonialism, for instance, is largely left out of the equation as a char-
acteristic of Judeo-Christian culture. On the contrary, most authors
mentioned above display an allergy for what is perceived to be politi-
cally correct feelings of guilt towards the colonial past. Emphasizing
the constructive role of religious practices that blur the boundaries
between white Judeo-Christianity and its others both in history and
in contemporary practices can provide a firm basis for restaging the
performative. James Kennedy and Markha Valenta, as well as Peter
van der Veer, have, for instance, emphasized that the Netherlands
were, during the colonial occupation of what is now called Indonesia,
the largest Islamic country on earth (Kennedy and Valenta, 2006). A
rewriting of Dutch history that takes this seriously, an Islamo-Judeo-
Christian history, perhaps, would therefore be an important start.
A similar case can be made for the ‘Judeo’ in Judeo-Christianity: this is,
as we have seen, a recent invention: before the Second World War,
one would be hard-pressed to find a description of Western culture
as Judeo-Christian, meant in a positive sense. Furthermore, in all of
the invocations seen above there seems to be no actual connection
to Judaic traditions. This leads to intriguing paradoxes; for instance,
Geert Wilders, whilst pushing for a ban on ritual slaughter out of
defence of Judeo-Christian values, enabled the outlawing of kosher
food as well (Valenta, 2012). Also, there is hardly any reference to the
centuries of antisemitism that is also part of religious history (‘Islamic
fascism’, or ‘Islamic antisemitism’, has taken over that role). The result
is a rather one-sided inclusion of Jewish influence in the constitution
of Dutch national identity that can just as well be called an exclusion.
The westernization (which in fact is a colonization) of Judaism can be
countered by stressing not just the fact that for centuries the Jewish
tradition was Christianity’s other (as is shown by the antisemitic over-
tones in the history of the term Judeo-Christian), but also by stressing
affinities between traditions and geographical locations.
The claim that progressive values such as gay rights are part of an
explicitly Western, secular-religious framework threatens to equate
emancipation with Western practices. In the work of Saba Mahmood,
as in the work of Rosi Braidotti and Joan Scott, a case is made for a
72 Ernst van den Hemel

redefinition of feminism: these new forms of feminism would have

the challenge to be able to incorporate religious practices as emanci-
patory practices as well and to avoid the pitfall of equating feminism
with secular critique (Mahmood, 2005; Braidotti, 2008; Scott 2009).
These sort of emancipatory acts that do not fit the Judeo-Christian-
secular model of emancipation, whether in history or in the present,
need to be recognized as politically relevant.
Finally, the almost complete absence of faith in the appeals to Judeo-
Christian roots creates the potential for actual religious experiences
to return and disrupt the ‘culturalization’ of religion. Faith, as well
as religion in general, instead of its secular definition as a pietistic
internal affair, and the culturalized definition described above, can
be reconceptualized as a politically relevant act with consequences
for the implicit history symbolized by the culturalization of Judeo-
Christian roots. But, in order for this debate to take off, the (pro)
claiming of tradition and national identity needs to happen on more
fronts than just the conservative, nationalist, postsecular one. Old
separations between disciplines, institutions, and modes of identifi-
cations are in dire need of reassessment. In spite of all its ambiguity,
postsecular scholarship will have an important role to play in the
Netherlands.

Notes
1. See the following excerpts from a speech by EU-sceptic Nigel Farage, in
which Nigel Farage moves seamlessly from ‘Judeo-Christian values’ to
‘all the good Christianity has done over the ages’, note how the ‘Judeo’
is increasingly absent from these reflections: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=ME4lHJVU1iE.
2. See the reflection by Bart de Wever, contemporary nationalist politician in Belgium
on the link between Judeo-Christian roots and the outlawing of polygamy:
http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=343NSB0H&s=1.
3. See conservative author Robert Spaemann’s appeal to reinstate the ban on
blasphemy to protect the specifically Judeo-Christian roots of German society:
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/robert-spaemann-zur-blas-
phemie-debatte-beleidigung-gottes-oder-der-glaeubigen-11831612.html.
4. See Sarkozy’s appeal to Judeo-Christian roots in France in February 2012:
http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2012/02/10/01002–20120210ARTFIG00586-
nicolas-sarkozy-mes-valeurs-pour-la-france.php.
5. ‘Na een lange geschiedenis met tal van zwarte bladzijden hebben rational-
isme, humanisme en christendom een aantal fundamentele politieke begin-
selen voortgebracht, zoals de scheiding van kerk en staat, de vrijheid van
meningsuiting, de verdraagzaamheid en de non-discriminatie’ (Bolkestein,
2005).
 (Pro)claiming Tradition 73

6. James Beckford, for instance, identifies six main clusters of definitions of

postsecularism, and proceeds to offer a convincing critique of all six of them
(Beckford, 2012). See also Veith Bader’s article in which he criticizes the use
of postsecularism for, amongst other reasons, failing to offer a ‘sound basis
for normative debates’ (Bader, 2012).
7. Leading to sometimes paradoxical results: in 2010 and 2011, a debate ensued
in the Dutch Parliament and Senate following a law that would outlaw ritual
slaughter. Geert Wilders’s PVV, a strong proponent of defending Judeo-
Christian Dutch identity strongly supported the ban, leading to the paradox-
ical situation that a ritual practice characteristic of a religion central to Dutch
society was banned by those claiming to defend its interests, see Valenta
(2012).
8. For a discussion of the contemporary status of pillarization, see Kennedy and
Valenta (2006).
9. ‘Celui qui a des extases, des visions, qui prend des songes pour des réalités,
et ses imaginations pour des prophéties, est un fanatique novice qui donne
de grandes espérances: il pourra bientôt tuer pour l’amour de Dieu’ (Pomeau
and Le Roy Ladurie, 1994).
10. ‘Ik wil dat we de Leitkultur in Nederland in artikel 1 van de Grondwet gaan
vastleggen. Onze dominante waarden zijn gebaseerd op de joodse, humanis-
tische en christelijke traditie. Daar moeten we trots op zijn, want daarin ligt
besloten wie wij zijn. Bovendien kunnen wij daarmee vastleggen wat wij niet
willen. We moeten niet willen dat een andere cultuur, de islamitische, gaat
overheersen.’
11. ‘De christen-democraten hebben hun soevereiniteit in eigen kring gekregen:
alle gemeenschapszin is in het regeerakkoord geïnstitutionaliseerd. We
vinden het gezin belangrijk, dús komt er een minister voor Jeugd en Gezin.
Het woord ‘samen’ komt 10.000 keer voor in het regeerakkoord, maar dat
zegt niets over de verbanden tussen mensen. We moeten het debat gaan
voeren over onze culturele identiteit, maar dat negeert Balkenende volledig’
(Wilders, 2011). Translation mine.
12. De problemen concentreren zich op al die medeburgers die komen uit cultu-
urgebieden die ver tot zeer ver af staan van de onze. Meer in het algemeen
kan worden gesteld dat de islamitische culturen ver af staan van de joods-
christelijk humanistische cultuurgebieden. ... De problemen inzake integratie
en wederzijdse acceptatie spitsen zich toe op de relatie van de dominante
joods-christelijk humanistische cultuur enerzijds en de islamitische cultuur
anderzijds. Ik spreek hier uitdrukkelijk in de veel bredere termen van cultuur
dan van godsdienst. Een godsdienst kan men verlaten, zoals in ons land op
grote schaal gebeurt, een cultuur kan men echter niet verlaten (Fortuyn,
2002: 83).
13. ‘Maar dat bezielend verband, of zoals sommigen het noemen de gedeelde
mythe, is er niet meer. En nu is de vraag, of we ook zonder dit verband goed
kunnen functioneren. Er zijn velen die menen dat de Grondwet een bezielend
verband kan geven. Maar zelf heb ik het stiekeme gevoel dat dit niet voldoende
is. We kunnen wel zeggen: ‘hiep hoi, we zijn geen christenen meer’. Maar
houdt dat op de lange duur? Hoe staan we er over vijftig tot tachtig jaar voor?
Sommige intellectuelen zijn om die reden katholiek geworden. Voor mij zou
dat kunstmatig zijn, omdat ik niet godsdienstig ben. Maar ik zou me zeker een
cultuurchristen willen noemen. ... ’ Bolkestein (1992).
74 Ernst van den Hemel

14. ‘om liberaal te zijn moet je tegenwoordig terug naar de wortels. Dus conserva-
tief zijn’ (Standaard, 2004).
15. ‘Het conservatisme is nodig om het liberalisme voor zelfmoord te behoeden’
(Spruyt, 2005).
16. Cf. Fortuyn (2002): ‘I don’t want to have to do the emancipation of gays and
women all over again.’
17. For details see ‘Genoeg is genoeg: verbied de Koran’ (‘Enough is enough:
Outlaw the Koran’) in Volkskrant, 8 August 2007 (Wilders, 2007).
18. For a detailed analysis on the historical connection between the turn to the
right in the Netherlands and both Dutch and American think tanks, see
Oudenampsen (2013).
19. ‘In het algemeen geldt dat de klassieke en christelijke intellectuele traditie
een onmisbare bron is van kennis en wetenschap, ook al kan het meeste wat
in die traditie wordt verwoord niet worden ‘bewezen’ volgens de criteria van
de moderne natuurwetenschap’ (Kinneging, 2000).
20. ‘Laten we hopen dat Schmitt gelijk had toen hij zei dat de vijand “onze eigen
vraag als gestalte” is, en dat wij in deze confrontatie onze identiteit weer
herontdekken’ (Spruyt, 2005: 63). Translation mine.
21. ‘Wat ons echter daadwerkelijk wordt aangeboden door de Partij van de
Vrijheid, is het schaamteloze tegendeel van de joods-christelijke en human-
istische radities’ (Riemen, 2010: 45). Translation mine.

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Belgium: Boekencentrum.
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20 March 2004.
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New York: Simon and Schuster.
Toscano, A. (2010). Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea. London: Verso.
Valenta, M. (2012). Pluralist Democracy or Scientistic Monocracy? Debating Ritual
Slaughter. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research
Network.
Valk, G. (2011). ‘Het Koninkrijk van Allah Zal Er Nooit Komen.’ NRC, 12 March.
Vries, Hent De and Lawrence Eugene Sullivan (2006). Political Theologies: Public
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4
Re-examining an Ethics of
Citizenship in Postsecular Societies
Christoph Baumgartner

Jürgen Habermas is, without any doubt, one of the most influential,
albeit not undisputed, authors in the debate about ‘postsecularity’, ‘post-
secularism’, ‘the postsecular’, ‘postsecular societies’, and so forth. Unlike
many other authors who use these concepts to describe and explain the
continuing presence of religion in contemporary ‘modern’ societies (see
Beckford, 2012), the core of Habermas’s notion of the postsecular society
is normative. It includes an ethics of citizenship that aims at making it
possible that all citizens can participate as equals in democratic proce-
dures, including public political debate about matters of common
interest, and hence in co-determining the development of their society.
This contribution critically examines Habermas’s proposal of an ethics
of citizenship in postsecular societies in view of the question whether it
is able to adequately deal with problems that arise in public controver-
sies about particular verbal and non-verbal acts of expression, namely
acts which are understood by their authors as contributions to public
debate, which are experienced by numerous believers as denigration of
their religion, and as offence to their religious sensibilities. Controversies
about such acts offer especially interesting possibilities for an investiga-
tion of normative dimensions of the notion of the postsecular and post-
secular societies, respectively. For what is at stake, here, is not only the
demand of religious people that they themselves should be allowed to
practise their religion (like in the case of debates about ritual slaughter
or the wearing of religious clothing). Rather, the controversies that I am
interested in concern the formal and informal rules that structure the

77
78 Christoph Baumgartner

public sphere common to all members of society, whether religious or

not (see March, 2012: 320), and the discursive space that is essential for
the legitimate exercise and control of democratic politics. Accordingly,
this chapter aims to contribute both to the debate about postsecularism
and to the broader political philosophical task of developing an ethics
of citizenship in democratic and pluralistic societies.
The concrete example that will serve as the background of my anal-
ysis of Habermas’s position is the public controversy about the so-called
Muhammad cartoons, published first in 2005 by Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten, and – importantly – about public protests against it. I
will argue that Habermas’s understanding of an ethics of citizenship in
postsecular societies is too limited to be able to adequately deal with the
various obstacles that can prevent people from participating as equals
in public political debate. As I will show, the main reason for this is
that Habermas focuses strongly, albeit not exclusively, on epistemic
attitudes that are situated on a cognitive level, while important obsta-
cles to participation in public political debate are related to emotional,
and cultural elements. I will suggest that political philosophy must go
beyond Habermas’s ethics of citizenship in postsecular societies, in order
to be able to grasp and possibly dismantle elements that can effectively
exclude citizens from public political debate.

Habermas’s ethics of democratic citizenship in

postsecular societies

Like other authors who address the notion of the postsecular and
postsecular societies, respectively, Habermas unfolds his considera-
tions about postsecular societies against the background of the failure
of the secularization thesis. The theoretic angle, however, from which
Habermas approaches the topic, differs significantly from that of, for
instance, sociologists of religion who describe developments in the reli-
gious landscape of particular societies. His considerations are part of a
larger political philosophical project that aims to answer the question of
how we should understand ourselves as members of democratic socie-
ties where religion plays an important role in the lives of many citizens,
and what we can, or must, reciprocally expect from another in order to
make it possible that all citizens can participate as equals in social inter-
actions, including public political debate.1 More specifically, Habermas
aims to provide a solution of a problem that results from the claim that,
according to the model of deliberative democracy, political decisions can
only be taken to be legitimate if they can be justified by reasons that all
 Re-examining an Ethics of Citizenship in Postsecular Societies 79

citizens can equally accept. Reasons that depend on religious authorities

such as sacred texts or instructions of religious dignitaries do not count
as acceptable in that sense. Because of this, religious citizens cannot
directly contribute with their religiously based convictions to democratic
debate but are supposed to ‘translate’ them into what counts as ‘secular’
or ‘public’ reasons which are independent of any reference to religion.
This, however, means that religious citizens are ‘encumbered with an
asymmetrical burden’ (Habermas, 2006: 11), since they may make (valid)
contributions to public political debate only if they translate their ‘reli-
gious language’ into ‘public reasons’, whereas secular citizens are not
required to make comparable efforts. Even more, for some people it can
be impossible to translate their religious views into a language of secular
reasons since this would require them to undertake an ‘artificial division
[between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ convictions] within their own minds’
(Habermas, 2006: 8) which would not be possible without jeopardizing
their identity as pious persons. To require believers to pay such a price
for the possibility to make use of their right to political participation,
however, is morally problematic: ‘a state cannot encumber its citizens,
whom it guarantees freedom of religious expression, with duties that are
incompatible with pursuing a devout life – it cannot expect something
impossible of them’ (Habermas, 2006: 7).
To solve this problem of an undue asymmetrical burden, Habermas
restricts the ‘translation proviso’ to the realm of institutionalized prac-
tices of deliberation and decision-making in political bodies such as the
parliament. In the ‘“wild life” of the political public sphere’, however,
religious citizens should be allowed to couch their contributions in reli-
gious language. Furthermore, and for the context of this chapter espe-
cially importantly, Habermas construes the task of translating religious
contributions into a ‘generally accessible language’ as a collaborative
task: Both religious and non-religious citizens must likewise participate
in this task, and ‘secular citizens must open their minds to the possible
truth content of those presentations and enter into dialogues from
which religious reasons then might well emerge in the transformed
guise of generally accessible arguments’ (Habermas, 2006: 11). This has
a number of normative implications that concern the cognitive or epis-
temic attitudes that both religious and non-religious citizens of post-
secular societies need to develop.
Religious citizens, on the one hand, must develop epistemic attitudes
that enable them to constructively cope with challenges and cognitive
dissonances that could arise from the fact that their religion is faced with
pluralism, the emergence of modern science, and profane morality and
80 Christoph Baumgartner

law. Regarding the latter, Habermas points out, fundamental normative

principles such as the separation of religion and state and, related to
this, the secular legitimation of politics must be supported from within
the view of the respective religious traditions and communities. In this
regard, Habermas speaks of a ‘modernization of religious consciousness’
that results from a ‘learning process’ that must be undertaken from
within religious traditions themselves (Habermas, 2006: 14).2
Non-religious, or ‘secular’ citizens, on the other hand, are required
to develop comparable epistemic attitudes in the context of a post-
secular society: They must self-reflectively transcend a secularist self-
understanding of modernity that encounters religion with ‘sparing
indifference’ and that understands religious traditions as ‘archaic relics
of pre-modern societies’ (Habermas, 2006: 15). In other words, secular
citizens must develop an epistemic stance that prepares them to take
religious contributions to public political debate seriously and even to
actively help to investigate whether such contributions include moral
intuitions that can be expressed in secular language and justified by
reasons that are accessible for all.
This specific ethics of democratic citizenship is the core of Habermas’s
notion of postsecularism and postsecular societies, respectively.
Accordingly, the decisive feature of a postsecular society is not so much
a return or a revitalization of religions in the public sphere, et cetera,
but rather ‘that it is epistemically adjusted to the continued existence of
religious communities’ (Habermas, 2006: 15, italics in original) which
requires a change in mentality that is cognitively exacting for both reli-
gious and non-religious citizens. To be ‘postsecular’ in that sense is not
so much a ‘fact’ (like the ‘return’ and continuing presence of public
religion is said to be) but rather a political ethical requirement, because
neither a widespread secularist mentality including a more or less blunt
rejection of religion as ‘backward’ or ‘anti-democratic’, nor ‘fundamen-
talist’ attitudes of a large number of religious citizens are compatible
with deliberative democracy and the ideal of equality of participation
in public political debate (Habermas, 2008: 27). This requirement,
however, does not primarily concern institutions of society (such as the
law), but mental attitudes and, especially, cognitive capacities of citizens
which is why Michele Dillon points out that ‘it seems [Habermas] really
intends to talk about a postsecular Zeitgeist’ rather than about a postsec-
ular society (Dillon, 2012: 257). The ethics of citizenship of which the
postsecular Zeitgeist is a part, is construed almost exclusively in cogni-
tive terms by Habermas; other elements, such as culturally predominant
imaginaries, embodied emotions and frameworks for perception and
 Re-examining an Ethics of Citizenship in Postsecular Societies 81

interpretation that are applied more or less unconsciously, are largely,

but not entirely, ignored. There are some small traces that can be under-
stood as acknowledgement of the influence that not purely cognitive
elements can exercise on the process of public debate, in general, and the
inclusion of convictions of ‘religious citizens’ in this process, in partic-
ular. The above-mentioned requirement that ‘the secular citizens must
open their minds to the possible truth content’ of contributions that are
made in religious language (Habermas, 2006: 11) could be understood as
indication that Habermas does not completely overlook such not purely
cognitive aspects. However, this does not alter the fact that his ethics
of citizenship in postsecular societies is construed primarily in terms
of ‘cognitive burdens’ and an ‘epistemic adjustment’ of society and its
citizens respectively to the presence of religion.

Conditions of participating in public political debate

As was already mentioned above, the main purpose of an ethics of citi-

zenship in postsecular societies is to make it possible that all citizens
can participate as equals in democratic procedures, including public
political debate. Clearly, open public debate is important for democratic
societies since legitimate democratic power is constituted and controlled
by the people. Matters of common interest need to be publicly discussed
and all members of society, certainly those who are affected by a certain
matter or political decision, must be able to fully participate in public
debate about it.
Concern for an open public debate in pluralistic democratic socie-
ties was also the frame into which the editors of Jyllands-Posten placed
the publication of the Muhammad cartoons. According to Flemming
Rose, cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, the reason to commission and
publish the cartoons was what he perceived as an increasing self-cen-
sorship among authors, artists, and translators which was, according
to Rose, caused by fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with
issues related to Islam (Klausen, 2009: 13–20; Rose, 2006). Such self-
censorship motivated by fear, Rose argued, was incompatible with
political democratic debate, and the goal of the publication of the
cartoons ‘was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression
that seemed to be closing in tighter’ (Rose, 2006). In other words, the
stated aim of Jyllands-Posten was to further public debate in democratic
societies about issues such as freedom of expression, freedom of reli-
gion, cultural and religious diversity, but also about possible relations
between Islam and violence.
82 Christoph Baumgartner

But what does it mean for public debate to be ‘open’ in the norm-
atively relevant sense mentioned at the beginning of this section? To
be able to function as democratic political forum, public debate must
be open in a twofold sense. First, it is necessary that all matters that
are considered of common interest can be publicly discussed. Second,
everyone who is affected by a certain matter or political decision must be
able to contribute to public debate about it. These formal requirements
are grasped by the right to freedom of expression, including the right
to access to mass media. There are, however, also informal precondi-
tions. As a form of public communication, political democratic debate
is always dependent on what Bernhard Peters calls ‘public culture’ that
consists of stocks of shared knowledge, norms, values and conventions,
rituals, symbols, and so forth, which build contexts of meaning, disposi-
tions for attentiveness, and components for frameworks within which
certain events and decisions are interpreted or justified (see Peters, 2008:
69–76, 219–221). On the basis of a public culture, it becomes possible
for different people to understand statements, events, or decisions, to
evaluate and weigh them, and to communicate about them in a broader
public. In that sense, public culture is ‘the quintessence of facilitative
and restrictive conditions of communication within a community.
Public culture works like a sluice, opening and closing communicative
opportunity.’ (Wessler and Wingert, 2008: 5). For the interest of this
chapter it is especially important that certain components of public
culture concern the respective community or society itself. These ‘collec-
tive self-images’ (Peters, 2008) refer, for example, to the history and the
current state of the respective community and to cultural, historical, or
political achievements. Furthermore, they include criteria that are used
to ascribe group membership to certain people and to exclude others;
they are linked with (mostly positive) self-evaluations and ideals, on the
one hand, and with ‘contrasting images of other groups’ and ‘defini-
tions of the relations to other collectivities (as friendly or hostile and
so on)’ (Peters, 2008: 72), on the other hand. In democratic societies,
‘public culture’ includes normative assumptions that predetermine
‘how citizens interpret their civic bonds in practice, who they regard as
competent citizens, who they regard as incompetent, how much unity
and how much diversity they think a democratic polity needs or can
endure’ (Brink, 2007: 354). Such ‘informal conceptions of democratic
life’ (Brink, 2007) are usually rooted in dominant traditions and often
represent and reproduce social power relations. They strongly influ-
ence the way in which citizens who are differently situated within the
informal power relations of society think of themselves and of others in
 Re-examining an Ethics of Citizenship in Postsecular Societies 83

view of democratic citizenship. Accordingly, they influence the domi-

nant ‘grammar’ of public debate and determine who is recognized as
competent and ‘respectable’ contributor and what passes for a valuable
contribution. This is especially important in the case of public polit-
ical debate as a specific form of communication where people do not
merely want to tell others their views but put in normative, political
claims, for instance concerning free speech, self-censorship and the
relation between particular religions and violence (like Jyllands-Posten
did) or regarding the proper public treatment of what religious believers
consider sacred (like many protestors against the publication of the
Muhammad cartoons did). In doing so, contributors claim the authority
of somebody who is, as member of a democratic society and on a par
with others, legitimately engaged in the process of self-government and
in the ongoing process of developing and (re)shaping of society and
its formal and informal institutions. This distinguishes public political
debate from other forms of public communication that do not share the
normative significance for democratic politics. In order to succeed, the
specific authority of the speaker as having a say in matters concerning
the society in question must be recognized by other participants of the
debate. Otherwise, the person may be able to make use of her right to
freedom of expression; she may be able to use media to convey her
claims and arguments. Nevertheless, without being recognized as some-
body who has a say in matters concerning the development of society,
the person cannot succeed to fully participate as peer in public political
debate.3 It is this latter aspect of a specific authority that needs to be
recognized by others in order to be able to fully and effectively partici-
pate as equal in public debate that is especially interesting in the anal-
ysis of, for instance, the controversy about the Muhammad cartoons in
light of the notion of the postsecular.

Debating Muhammad cartoons – construing debaters4

Almost immediately after the publication, the cartoons became an object

of intense public debate. The editors of Jyllands-Posten received moderate
support, and the cartoons were republished on the Internet and by news-
papers in various countries. There was, however, also harsh criticism of
the publication of cartoons, which partially was staged for political and
economic reasons not, or not directly, related to the cartoons. It cannot
be doubted, however, that many Muslims experienced the cartoons as
moral insult, offence to their religious sensibilities, or as expressions of
hostility against Islam (see Klausen, 2009; Mahmood, 2009; Levey and
84 Christoph Baumgartner

Modood, 2009). Many Muslims voiced their discontent in newspapers,

talk shows, and in public protests in countries almost all over the world.
In Europe, on which I will focus here, protestors predominantly reacted
moderately and expressed their protest in, for example, petitions to
political representatives and passionate but peaceful demonstrations. In
countries of the Middle East, the Caucasus region, South and Southeast
Asia, and Africa, however, imams and political representatives mobilized
demonstrations that partly turned into riots and violent acts, such as
attacks on Danish embassies and death threats against cartoonists and
editors. The protests, in turn, were followed by reactions of (amongst
others) journalists, intellectuals, and politicians, and this is the part of
the controversy that I am especially interested in. Although the debate
about the different kinds of protests against the publication of the
Muhammad cartoons was very heterogeneous and often disordered, I
suggest distinguishing three types of reactions to the protests: quali-
fied solidarity, assimilationist critique, and exclusive rejection. I do not
claim that it is possible to capture the details of the entire controversy
by means of this classification, but it is sufficient to yield insights that
can be used for a re-examination of Habermas’s ethics of citizenship in
postsecular societies.
Qualified solidarity. Throughout the debate, Muslims who objected to
the publication of the cartoons received solidarity from members of
other religions, as well as from non-religious people. Sympathetic reac-
tions that followed the protests usually pointed out that freedom of
expression does not include the right to intentionally offend religious
sensibilities, but rather a responsibility to treat the deeply held religious
beliefs of others respectfully. Such views were advocated, for example,
by the Nordic Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church which
declared that they deplored the publication of the cartoons, describing
them as an ‘attack on religion’ that caused hurt among Muslims. The
Nordic Bishops’ Conference pointed out that they ‘welcome free and
open discussion which searches the truth but in a context and climate
of mutual respect and knowledge about what one is speaking of’
(Conferentia Episcopalis Scandiae, 2006). Similarly, representatives of
the United Nations, the European Union, and the Islamic Conference
jointly stated that they shared ‘anguish’ of the Muslim world at the
Muhammad cartoons, claiming that ‘[i]n all societies there is a need to
show sensitivity and responsibility in treating issues of special signifi-
cance for the adherents of any particular faith, even by those who
do not share the belief in question’ (United Nations Department of
Public Information, 2006). The solidarity with protesting Muslims was
 Re-examining an Ethics of Citizenship in Postsecular Societies 85

qualified, however, since tighter legal restrictions on freedom of expres-

sion did not find much support, and violent reactions to the cartoons
were condemned virtually unanimously in the public debate of Western
societies. The essential message was that critique and public debate
must be possible, but that Jyllands-Posten went overboard by publishing
depictions that were bound to be profoundly offensive to a religious
minority in Denmark.
Assimilationist critique. Reactions to protests against the cartoons that
are in accordance with this type of critique point out that, since one
man’s orthodoxy is another man’s blasphemy, in democratic and plural-
istic societies, all citizens will encounter practices, statements, and images
that are, in one way or another, offensive to them. However, it was said,
all citizens of pluralistic societies need to be able to cope with such acts
and objects constructively. Against this background, protests against the
Muhammad cartoons were construed as proof that many Muslims were
hyper-susceptible to religious offence which again was seen as evidence
that they take their religion ‘too seriously’, and that they were not yet
enlightened or properly integrated in democratic culture (see Rostboll,
2009: 626). Such ‘religious squeamishness’, however, needs to be aban-
doned according to proponents of this type of critique, since otherwise
believers will not be able to function as competent citizens of demo-
cratic and pluralistic societies. In this context, acts and events like the
publication of the Muhammad cartoons were understood to be provoca-
tive, but valuable contributions, not only because they point to possibly
problematic aspects of particular ideologies but also because they can
unsettle the (religious) self-understanding of believers. This can lead to
a deconstruction of religious identities that are in conflict with funda-
mental principles and practices of democratic and pluralistic societies.
Thus, according to this view, religiously offensive acts such as the publi-
cation of the Muhammad cartoons can have a cathartic and integrative
effect.
This take on the publication of the cartoons and protests against it
concurs with the views of Carsten Juste, Editor in Chief of Jyllands-
Posten. Juste explained why the cartoons were published by claiming
that Muslims who publicly represent Islam in Denmark were voices
from ‘a dark and violent middle age’ and beset by a ‘sickly oversensi-
tivity’ to critique (Klausen, 2009: 13). Others joined in the course of the
debate, notably Flemming Rose who pointed to the Danish tradition of
satire that deals with, amongst other things, the royal family and other
public figures. Rose argued that the cartoonists treated Islam in the same
manner that they treat other religions. In so doing, he claimed, they
86 Christoph Baumgartner

treated Muslims in Denmark ‘as equals’, and ‘they made a point: We are
integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part
of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than
excluding, Muslims’ (Rose, 2006). As witness for his position Flemming
Rose refers to the Somali-born former Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali
who stated that the cartoons had sped up the integration of Muslims
into European societies by 300 years.
Exclusive rejection. This third type of critique is closely related to the
second, and the two often blend into each other. Reactions to protests
against religiously offensive acts that are in accordance with this view
take any opposition against the cartoons to be evidence not only of an
ostensible need for Muslims to ‘modernize’ their religious conscious-
ness and to better integrate into democratic culture but also as expres-
sion of anti-democratic attitudes and values. Proponents of this view
interpreted the predominantly peaceful protests of European Muslims
in light of the relatively few violent protests in Europe and the much
fiercer and violent reactions of Muslims, for example, in Lebanon and
Syria. Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis of a ‘clash of civilizations’ and
of ‘bloody borders of Islam’ (Huntington, 1996) was used as herme-
neutic framework here. ‘From this perspective’, Jytte Klausen points
out, ‘the protests were represented as entirely predictable results of the
atavistic opposition of Muslims to Europe’s secular values’ (Klausen,
2009: 10).
The tendency to construe opposition against the cartoons as evidence
of an ostensible clash of civilizations and a fundamental incompatibility
of liberal democracy and Islam was identified in an analysis of the media
treatment of the debate about the cartoons in Denmark and France
that was carried out by social scientists Carolina Boe and Peter Hervik
(Boe and Hervik, 2008). Their analysis shows that protesting Muslims
were not only construed as not being sufficiently offence-resilient and
in need of a reconstruction of their (religious) identity but were also
construed as fiercely opposing liberal democracy and its normative foun-
dations. This is remarkable inasmuch as the vast majority of Muslims
and other opponents of the cartoons used perfectly legitimate means to
express their discontent, including writing letters to the editor, demon-
strating, or suing newspapers that had published the cartoons (Boe and
Hervik, 2008: 214). Nevertheless, various influential contributors to the
debate conflated different forms of protest, both violent and non-vio-
lent, and interpreted them all as an apparent threat of an anti-demo-
cratic religious totalitarianism. One of several examples thereof is Ayaan
 Re-examining an Ethics of Citizenship in Postsecular Societies 87

Hirsi Ali’s speech ‘The Right to Offend’ that she delivered in Berlin in
February 2006. In that speech, Hirsi Ali claims that the publication of
the cartoons:

has ... revealed the presence of a considerable minority in Europe who

do not understand or will not accept the workings of liberal democ-
racy. These people – many of whom hold European citizenship have
campaigned for censorship, for boycotts, for violence, and for new
laws to ban ‘Islamophobia’. (Hirsi Ali, 2006)

Hirsi Ali mentions ordinary means of civic participation in public debate

and democratic processes and the campaigns for violence, in the same
breath, and she seems to link all forms of protest against the cartoons to
anti-democratic attitudes. Other contributions were even more explicit
and harsher in their use of rhetoric of war in the description of the
controversy about the Muhammad cartoons. Boe and Hervik’s media
analysis shows that Islam was often strikingly compared to totalitari-
anism and fascism (Boe and Hervik, 2008: 219–221). Furthermore, in
both French and Danish media coverage of the cartoon controversy,
references to Nazi Germany in the 1930s were used in order to compare
resistance against Nazism with a battle against ‘Islamism’ which is –
according to many voices in the debate – to be fought today (Boe and
Hervik, 2008: 219). Boe and Hervik also show that public debate about
the cartoon controversy hardly allowed for any differentiated positions
to be adopted. Rather, the discussion seems to have followed the motto:
‘You are either with us, or against us’. The attitude of many partici-
pants in the controversy was not the attitude of an open debate about
the ongoing development of society, but rather of strict opposition or
even of conflict and struggle. Again, Hirsi Ali’s February 2006 speech
provides an example of her blaming those people who did not unre-
servedly support the editors of the newspapers which (re)published the
cartoons.

Shame on those papers and TV channels who lacked the courage

to show their readers the caricatures in The Cartoon Affair. These
intellectuals live off free speech but they accept censorship. They
hide their mediocrity of mind behind noble-sounding terms such
as ‘responsibility’ and ‘sensitivity’. Shame on those politicians who
stated that publishing and re-publishing the drawings was ‘unneces-
sary’, ‘insensitive’, ‘disrespectful’ and ‘wrong’. (Hirsi Ali, 2006)
88 Christoph Baumgartner

A critical re-examination of Habermas’s ethics of

citizenship in postsecular societies

What does this analysis of parts of the Muhammad cartoons controversy

mean for Jürgen Habermas’s ethics of citizenship in postsecular socie-
ties? Is his proposal able to achieve what it aims to achieve: to enable
all citizens, whether religious or not, to participate as equals in public
political debate about matters of common interest?
The brief sketch of different types of responses to protests against
the publication of the Muhammad cartoons shows that the process
of translating religious convictions into a seemingly generally acces-
sible language and ‘secular reasons’, which is the core of Habermas’s
proposal, seems not to have been of major importance here. The only
claim of protesting Muslims that was based on particular religious
beliefs was the argument that the cartoons were wrong because images
of Muhammad were generally forbidden, a view that is contested in
Islamic tradition itself (see Naef, 2007). This argument, however, did
not feature prominently in the protests of believers. Much more impor-
tant were arguments related to profound offence or social marginali-
zation and denigration, all of which were usually couched in ‘secular’
terms. In light of this, Habermas’s strong focus on epistemic attitudes and
strictly deliberative forms of public debate appears surprising and rather
unfruitful. A brief re-reading of the three types of responses to protests
against the Muhammad cartoons in light of Habermas’s notion of the
postsecular (and the other way round) promises to yield insights that
could be used for a possible future revision of an ethics of citizenship in
postsecular societies.
In the case of the first type of response, qualified solidarity, it is important
to recognize that those people who expressed solidarity with profoundly
offended Muslims were willing to imagine something, and take it seri-
ously, that they themselves did not experience, namely a specific kind
of moral insult that is related to a particular religious subjectivity, as
Saba Mahmood has shown. Mahmood points out that, for certain pious
Muslims, religion is experienced as habituated embodied practice, and
a devout Muslim’s relation to Muhammad a relationship of intimacy
and similitude (Mahmood, 2009: 72). Such people experience the kind
of moral injury brought about by the publication of the Muhammad
cartoons as profound offence which emanates ‘from the perception that
one’s being, grounded as it is in a relationship of dependency with the
Prophet, has been shaken’ (Mahmood, 2009: 78). The implied notion of
religion differs from the understanding of religion and proper religious
 Re-examining an Ethics of Citizenship in Postsecular Societies 89

subjectivity that was dominant in the cartoon controversy and that is

prominent in Habermas’s writings: a ‘modern concept of religion ... as
a set of propositions in a set of beliefs to which the individual gives
assent’ (Mahmood, 2009: 72); a liberal ‘Protestant’ notion of religion.
As a result, the insult that constituted the main problem of the cartoons
in the eyes of a group of devout Muslims remained to a large extent
unintelligible for other members of society. Against this background,
the ‘openness’ of non-Muslim citizens who expressed their solidarity
with protesting Muslims does not simply go without saying, since (if the
solidarity was based on an empathic understanding of the insult that
some Muslims suffered) it presupposes the ability to conceive a form of
religious subjectivity that differs from what is predominantly conceived
as ‘modern’, without at the same time (dis)qualifying these believers as
anti-modern or religious fundamentalists, and without denying them
the status of equal members of society. This could be understood as
being in accordance with Habermas’s claim that secular citizens must
open their minds to the possible ‘truth content’ of contributions that
are in one way or the other related to the religion of some of their fellow
citizens. However, a process of translation of ‘religious language’ into
‘generally accessible arguments’ in Habermas’s sense seems not to be
involved here, at least not prominently.
The core of the second type of response to the protests, assimila-
tionist critique, is that Muslims who protest against the Muhammad
cartoons are seen as not yet being competent democratic citizens
because of their ostensible hyper-susceptibility to religious offence. To
a certain extent, this seems to be in line with Habermas’s claim that in
postsecular societies religious citizens need to develop epistemic atti-
tudes that enable them to constructively deal with the challenges that
can result from encounters with other religions or non-religious world
views (see Habermas, 2006: 14). But Habermas’s position seems not to
be able to empathically deal with the moral insult that, according to
Saba Mahmood’s analysis, devout Muslims feel in view of, for instance,
the Muhammad cartoons. But is this a problem? Mahmood is able to
describe and explain the religious subjectivity of a certain group of
devout Muslims and the special kind of moral insult that can result
from encounters with images such as the Muhammad cartoons. Her
analysis does not show, however, that such believers have a right that
others refrain from treating their religion as if it was ‘modern’ in the
above-mentioned sense: a set of beliefs which one accepts or rejects
(and Mahmood does not claim such a right). Religions are always
public in the sense that they also ‘produce doctrines beliefs, practices,
90 Christoph Baumgartner

institutions, symbols and discourses that others experience as part of

their social world’, and because of this ‘offense or injury may simply
be a double-effect of persons expressing themselves about how they
experience that world.’ (March, 2012: 336). In light of this, a claim
that ‘non-Protestant’ forms of religious subjectivity should be protected
from injurious speech is, ironically ‘nothing other than a demand that
other citizens treat their own beliefs in ‘Protestant’ terms – that is, as
beliefs that must only be privately assented to and not manifested in
public through conduct and speech’ (March, 2012: 337).
So it seems that we encounter the problem that in certain situations
the ‘burdens’ that are connected with one’s being a member of a liberal
and pluralistic society are almost necessarily distributed unevenly for
people with different religious subjectivities. People who understand
their religion not primarily in terms of propositions and beliefs but as
embodied practices can be especially susceptible to painful experiences
in public debate about matters that are directly or indirectly related to
what is sacred to them, and an essential part of their identity. Jürgen
Habermas tries to deal with this by stating that in postsecular socie-
ties religious people must develop epistemic attitudes that allow them
to constructively deal with pluralism (see above). This comes close to
the claim that religious people are required to transform their religious
subjectivity in a way that it accords with a liberal ‘Protestant’ type of
religion. Habermas seems to feel uneasy with this when he rejects the
view that the required epistemic attitude of religious citizens could
result ‘from drill and forced adaptation’ which would, as he points out,
contradict the self-understanding of the constitutional state. ‘Learning
processes can be fostered, but not morally or legally stipulated’
(Habermas, 2008: 28; see also Habermas, 2006: 14). He tries to solve
this problem by construing the transformation of religions as result of a
‘learning process’ and of ‘arduous work of hermeneutic self-reflection’
that ‘must be undertaken from within religious traditions’ (Habermas,
2006: 14), and assimilationist critique ascribes to ‘provocative’ acts,
such as the publication of the Muhammad cartoons, a special construc-
tive potential to initiate such transformations and ‘learning processes’.
This, however, does not take away the fact that a possible transforma-
tion of religious subjectivities is far from being independent from social
and political circumstances, which always include formal and informal
relations of power. ‘Obviously’, Andrew F. March points out, ‘liberalism
is not indifferent to that transformation; it prefers religions that do
not oppose it to religions that do, and liberal terms of social coopera-
tion are more accommodating of some kinds of religious community
 Re-examining an Ethics of Citizenship in Postsecular Societies 91

than others’ (March, 2012: 337). What is important, however, in view

of public debates such as the Muhammad cartoons controversy about
religiously offensive acts, is that one cannot conclude from this that
people who do experience particular acts or objects as religiously offen-
sive, and express this – for instance in the form of public protests and
symbolic acts such as the burning of copies of newspapers – lack cogni-
tive or emotional competencies that are – ostensibly – necessary in
order to function as competent democratic citizen. To do so, and hence
to construe religious people who bring their concerns and injuries into
public political debate as insufficiently integrated into democratic soci-
eties, effectively means that a specific form of religion and religious
subjectivity, respectively, becomes a necessary condition for participa-
tion in public debate. This, however, comes close to an informal but
powerful discrimination against certain forms of religion and to an
informal exclusion of some devout believers from public debate. They
are, as it were, communicatively disabled because others deny them
the competency and the authority to participate in the ongoing devel-
opment of their society. This communicative disablement is especially
strong in the case of the third type of response to protests against the
cartoons, exclusive rejection, where sometimes fierce but peaceful
protests are mixed up with violent riots and understood and publicly
described as anti-democratic attitudes.
In terms of Habermas’s ethics of citizenship in postsecular socie-
ties, the roots of this problem of communicative disablement could be
ascribed to a failure of secular citizens to develop an epistemic attitude
that enables them to take seriously contributions of religious citizens,
and to be open to the possibility that claims that are – at first sight –
connected to or even based on religion, are valuable contributions to the
public political debate about the future of society. However, this does not
address the core of the problem that is at stake here. Habermas’s almost
exclusive focus on cognitive aspects of more comprehensive mentali-
ties, and on deliberative forms of public debate, is not able to adequately
deal with communicative distortions that are caused by visceral and
emotional aspects rather than by problems of translating religious truth
claims into ‘secular’ reasons. In the case of ‘exclusive rejection’ and
partly also in the case of ‘assimilationist critique’, religious people who
publicly voiced their protests against what they experienced as denigra-
tion of their religion were rendered mute, as it were, not because they
couched their contributions in religious language but because they were
construed as lacking the requisite competence and authority to partici-
pate as equals in public debate. This can be understood with reference
92 Christoph Baumgartner

to the concept of public culture. As I pointed out above, public culture

makes possible forms of public communication by providing stocks
of shared of knowledge, norms, values, conventions, and so forth. In
the case of public political debate, informal conceptions of democratic
life can be seen as part of public culture. Together with ‘collective self-
images’ of established groups, the informal conceptions of democratic
life predetermine who is considered a legitimate contributor to public
debate about the current state of affairs and the future development
of society. In the case of ‘exclusive rejection’, believers who protested
against the publication of the Muhammad cartoons were publicly
construed as opposing important elements of public culture and domi-
nant informal conceptions of democratic life. Not only their contribu-
tions but also the believers themselves, and even their religion as such,
were described as being ‘foreign’ or even a threat to democracy. In light
of violent riots and harsh statements of religious and political leaders
outside of Europe, which were an undeniable part of the controversy
and strongly influenced the media coverage of it, religion, more specifi-
cally Islam, was used as a marker that made the process of ‘othering’
possible. There is a threat that such constellations result in a ‘closure’
of public debate: participants are informally excluded by denying them
the requisite competence and authority, or because the speakers are
suspected of questionable motives and false consciousness (see Peters,
2008: 115).

Conclusion

The above considerations show that Habermas’s ethics of citizenship

in postsecular societies has strengths but also important limitations. It
cannot solve important problems that can make it hard or even impos-
sible for believers to participate as equals in public political debate, and
to be recognized in their authority to participate as equal in processes
that determine the future development of society. One of the reasons
of these limitations of Habermas’s ethics of citizenship in postsecular
societies is Habermas’s strong focus on deliberative dimensions of public
debate and the related cognitive aspects; in particular, the problem of
how to justify political decisions in democratic and pluralistic socie-
ties without encumbering believers with an extra and undue burden.
This is an important problem, and Habermas’s proposal for its solution
has been very influential. However, the analysis of parts of the public
debate about the Muhammad cartoons shows that, at least in the case
of this controversy, believers were not excluded from public debate
 Re-examining an Ethics of Citizenship in Postsecular Societies 93

because they used ‘religious language’. The problem was also not that
‘secular’ citizens refused to take part in processes of translation, prima-
rily because there was no need to translate ‘religious’ into ‘generally
accessible’ language. Rather, the factors that could have prevented some
believers from participating on a par with others in public debate were
related to specific constellations where non-cognitive aspects played an
important role. An ethics of citizenship in postsecular societies must
deal with this, and include, for example, the powerful influence of
‘public culture’ and dominant informal conceptions of democratic life
in analyses and theory development. Such elements of ‘informal politics
of society’ (Scanlon, 2003) are especially effective and much harder to
control than formal rules concerning the legitimacy of specific validity
claims. In light of this, one important requirement of a revised ethics
of citizenship in postsecular societies will be that all citizens will prima-
rily be listened to and addressed as somebody who has a say in matters
concerning the development of society – not as a member of a specific
community or group – for instance, a religion, a cultural, or an ethnic
group (see Brink, 2007: 365). A further important requirement is that
‘pre-rational’ elements that underlie public debate, and influence it
significantly, such as public culture and informal conceptions of demo-
cratic life are submitted to constant critical reflection and possibly revi-
sion. Here I see an important collaborative task for both religious and
non-religious citizens.
An important conclusion that postsecular political philosophy
can draw from the analysis that is offered by this chapter is that an
ethics of citizenship that aims at enabling all citizens to participate as
equals in public debate must not limit its focus on cognitive or epis-
temic requirement as Habermas does. Public political debate is not a
purely ‘rational’ or ‘cognitive’ endeavour but permeated by bodily and
cultural influences that co-determine who is recognized as a competent
and ‘respectable’ contributor and what passes for a valuable contribu-
tion. The felicity conditions of the very specific act that ‘contributing as
fully recognized citizen to public political debate’ is can be disturbed by
influences from all of the different elements, be it cognitive, emotional,
or cultural. Accordingly, an ethics of citizenship in postsecular societies
must address all of these elements in order to be able to identify and
dismantle obstacles that prevent people from exercising their right to
participate as equals in public political debate about matters of common
interest, including matters concerning the formal and informal rules
that structure the public sphere common to all members of society,
whether religious or not.
94 Christoph Baumgartner

Notes
1. The following sketch of Habermas’s position is primarily based on Habermas
(2006) and Habermas (2008).
2. Habermas made this point in an earlier contribution as well: If conflicts
of loyalty are not to simmer, the necessary role differentiation between
members of one’s own religious community and co-citizens of the larger
society needs to be justified convincingly from one’s internal viewpoint.
Religious membership is in tune with its secular counterpart only if (from the
internal point of view of each) the corresponding norms and values are not
only different from each other but if the one set of norms can consistently
be derived from the other. If differentiation of both memberships is to go
beyond a mere modus vivendi, then the modernization of religious conscious-
ness must not be limited to some cognitively undiscerning attempt to ensure
that the religious ethos conforms to externally imposed laws of the secular
society. It calls instead for developing the normative principles of the secular
order from within the view of a respective religious tradition and community
(Habermas, 2004: 12).
3. This dependence of particular forms of communication on the recognition
of speaker’s authority is well investigated in philosophy of language. Mary
Kate McGowan, for instance, distinguishes between purely communicative
speech acts such as telling, on the one side, and speech acts that she calls
‘communication-plus’, on the other. For ‘telling’ it is essential (and sufficient)
that the hearer recognizes the speaker’s intention; as soon as the addressee
recognizes my intention to tell him or her (p), I have succeeded in telling
him or her (p). This is different in the case of ‘communicative-plus’-speech
acts: Such speech acts can only succeed if the speaker has a specific authority
that is recognized by the addressee. McGowan illustrates this by means of
the example of an order: ‘[S]uppose that I try to order my boss to give me a
raise. Although the boss recognizes my (misguided) intention to order her to
give me a raise, I nevertheless fail to do so exactly because I lack the requisite
authority’ (McGowan, 2009: 193).
4. This section follows, partly in wording, Baumgartner (2013).

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5
The Eradication of Transcendence
William Egginton

From the comfortable vantage of the metropolis, religion today recalls

the bumptious, somewhat embarrassing relative one wishes would not
show up just when the other guests are arriving. And that’s only the
charitably culturalist view. For the avidly secular, true believers are a
medieval remnant infecting a potentially pacific modernity with intol-
erant ignorance and deadly brutality. From the urban West, we look
down on the backwardness of our own backyards while looking aghast
at the slaughter abroad, and we blame it all on a credulity that we find
oddly out of place in modern, mainstream life.
Modern intellectual and cultural history provides a narrative to explain
our discomfort. Secularization describes the process whereby the modern
metropolis cast off the shrouds of irrational beliefs and learned to base
knowledge on evidence and politics on consensus around commonly
shared goals. Religious beliefs, which are resistant to evidence and
shared only by the select, were seen as inherently incompatible with a
rational public sphere and were relegated to the private sphere, where, it
was hoped by some, they could quietly wither away.
That this has not happened, that not only on distant shores but in the
heart of metropolitan modernity religion has again reared its ugly head
has provoked myriad attempts to explain what Jürgen Habermas called
‘a sweeping desecularization’ (Habermas, 2005: 12). As others, including
Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (2008) have argued, the ‘seculariza-
tion myth’ is itself suspect, and serves the interests of a very specific
version of modernity. In what follows, I concur with these authors
by criticizing the manifestation of the secularization myth inherent
in the view that Western modernity has liberated itself from political
theology. In so doing, I will largely focus my arguments on the position
of Mark Lilla, an intellectual historian at Columbia University, whose

97
98 William Egginton

work regularly appears in highbrow popular outlets like The New York
Review of Books, who has articulated to my mind one of the strongest
versions of the secularization myth. Lilla’s 2007 book, The Stillborn God:
Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, was notably dissimilar to some
of its more raucous cousins published during roughly the same period:
books by the so-called new atheists, including Sam Harris, Christopher
Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. Unlike those authors, Lilla did not so
much inveigh against the evils of religion as paint in detail the intel-
lectual history that made possible what Charles Taylor referred to as A
Secular Age (2007) while simultaneously cautioning his readers about the
fragility of that tradition and the need to protect it against a renascent
irrationalist past.
While rigorous in its recounting of the history of Western political
philosophy, Lilla’s book rehearses a profound misconception concerning
the relationship of human freedom and religious belief. By focusing
on the alternative liberalism offers to political theology, Lilla’s history
paints over how liberal political thought often served as a quiet hand-
maiden to the interest of a new and rising economic and political elite.
Defending carte blanche ‘the great tradition’ of liberal thought against
the threatening tide of religious fervour, as he calls for, Lilla fails to grasp
the extent to which religious fundamentalism today may be inspired
and fed not by its attachment to another great tradition of thought but
by the system of accumulation and exclusion necessitated by capitalism
and at least in part defended by liberal thought.
Lilla credits the Western liberal tradition as having created the unprec-
edented possibility of a notion of sovereignty not based on theology.
And indeed the authors he cites took part in a culture-wide movement
to eradicate any notion of a transcendental support from theories of
political sovereignty. What he does not stress, however, is how the same
authors often reveal how the essential finitude of the human condi-
tion necessitates transcendental reference points in the construction of
political models. By attempting to eradicate or otherwise disregard this
minimal degree of transcendence, the liberal tradition’s basic notion of
the self ultimately naturalizes a political economy based on property,
competition, and accumulation.
The real divide, then, is not between the great traditions of political
theology, on the one hand, and secular liberalism, on the other; rather,
it is between discourses that attempt to reduce or channel the human
urge to transcendence to serve the interests of political and economic
elites, and those – very much in the minority but in no way limited to
the four-hundred-year history of the modern West – that seek to remind
 The Eradication of Transcendence 99

us again and again that the baseline realities framed by the cultural elite
of any time are not the only options; that politics and economics are,
like culture, grounded neither in God or science but only in the shifting
sands of human finitude.

Religion and the legitimization of liberalism

‘The twilight of the idols has been postponed’ (Lilla, 2007: 4). Thus begins
Lilla’s defence of the Western liberal tradition against the re-emergence
of political theologies the world over. Western liberalism has been taken
by surprise, he argues, in part because liberal democracies have been
so successful in ‘creating an environment where public conflict over
competing revelations is virtually unthinkable today’ (Lilla, 2007: 4). A
major reason for this complacency is that we have been separated from
our own ‘long theological tradition of political thought by a revolution
in thinking that began roughly four centuries ago. We live, so to speak,
on the other shore. When we observe civilizations on the opposite bank,
we are puzzled, since we only have a distant memory of what it was
like to think as they do’ (Lilla, 2007: 4). The purpose of his book is to
reacquaint us with that other side of the bank, to make us appreciate the
‘fragility of our world’ (Lilla, 2007: 6), and ostensibly to be ‘clear about
those alternatives, choose between them, and live with the consequence
of our choice’ (Lilla, 2007: 13).
A powerful, even clarion call; and yet an enormous question seems
left for the begging: is it really so clear who ‘we’ are on this shore, staring
across the waters at other traditions, distant in either time or culture
from us? Is it really the case that on this, ‘our’ side, ‘public conflict
over competing revelations is virtually unthinkable today’? Or should
not such a claim, upon reflection and any given night’s election-year
coverage, provoke astonishment and the question, ‘which shore was it
that you happen to live on’? That the shore in Mark Lilla’s case is the
Morningside Heights neighbourhood around Columbia University may
explain a lot, for in the extra-academic environment of today’s religious
and political debates, both global and domestic, a shore devoid of such
conflict would be hard, indeed, to come upon.
The reason Mark Lilla’s shore seems so comfortable in its freedom
from revelation is that its intellectual foundation was, from its origins,
adopted as the justificatory pedestal for a mode of organizing both knowl-
edge and wealth that has proven enormously adept at reproducing itself,
even as it has served the interests of elites whose economic, political, and
cultural distance from the masses excluded from such privilege grows to
100 William Egginton

extraordinary proportions. When Lilla writes, ‘The novelty of modern

political philosophy was to have relinquished such comprehensive
claims by disengaging thought about the human political realm from
theological speculation about what might lie beyond it’ (Lilla, 2007: 7),
he gets that much right; but that is only part of the story. To the extent
that modern political philosophy engaged in a project of removing the
question of ‘what might lie beyond it’ from the human political realm, it
effectively acted to ground politics on a particular understanding of the
individual as a propertied, accumulating force, and then to universalize
that assumption.
Lilla’s own pantheon of heroes of the great separation begins with
Hobbes and Locke in the seventeenth century, and the Scottish thinker
David Hume in the eighteenth century. In the time that passed between
them the basic principle that politics should and can be organized without
regard to theology had been accepted, such that Lilla can write of Hume,
‘his Christian readers abhorred his religious views and rejected his skepti-
cism, but when it came to politics they were already adapting themselves
intellectually to the principles of the great separation he practiced’ (Lilla,
2007: 102–103). Indeed, the ‘art of intellectual separation’ developed
by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume is the model for the political philosophy
Lilla wishes to defend. The ‘crossing’ to our shore was complicated, in
his words, by both lingering Christian political theology and a sort of
deviation into religious anthropology by later Enlightenment thinkers
like Rousseau and Kant; but it was given its greatest drive by these former
thinkers. Hume’s eradication of transcendence informs not only his reli-
gious scepticism; it is integral to his epistemology and ethics as well.
At the same time, though, Hume’s thought consistently if inadvertently
acknowledges the operativity of human finitude in politics, and hence
the very source of the transcendence he seeks to eradicate. Moreover, the
form of his argumentation reveals that his idea of human subjectivity is
motivated less by a rejection of religious doctrine than by a legitimiza-
tion of the basic assumptions underlying economic liberalism.
In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1998), Hume tried
to articulate a theory of morals that dispensed with transcendent prin-
ciples by undermining what we could call the epistemological privi-
lege of subjectivity. It is not a coincidence that Hume can be counted
along with Spinoza and Leibniz as one of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical
heroes, and was the subject of his dissertation and first book, Empiricism
and Subjectivity (1991). In that book, Deleuze reads Hume as having laid
the groundwork for a radical empiricism that will enable the thinking
of subjectivity without recourse to any transcendental terms. As he puts
 The Eradication of Transcendence 101

it, ‘Empirical subjectivity is constituted in the mind under the influ-

ence of the principles affecting it; the mind therefore does not have the
characteristics of a preexisting subject’ (Deleuze, 1991: 29). For Deleuze,
Hume’s subject is radically immanent, built upon the sedimentation of
impressions and associations, and thus harbouring no bedrock of inde-
pendence from the natural or social world, and requiring no point of
transcendence outside that world.
After announcing in his introduction that philosophers have been
divided on the question of whether the principles of morality have been
drawn from reason or sentiment – that is, from abstract and universal
rules or from shared feelings in favour of virtue and in aversion to vice –
Hume announces that the origins of morality can indeed be found, but
only through applying the methodologies proven by natural philos-
ophy, that is, to ‘hearken to no arguments but those which are derived
from experience’ (Hume, 1998: 77). By observing how people, in fact,
act, in other words, Hume proposes to define adequately the principles
of morality. By the middle of his enquiry, experience has taught him
enough to claim that selfless action is an irreducible aspect of human
behaviour, universally admired and esteemed, and that ‘no better system
will ever, for the future, be invented, in order to account for the origin of
the benevolent from the selfish affections, and to reduce all the various
emotions of the human mind to a perfect simplicity’ (Hume, 1998: 166).
Morals need not be derived from either self-interest or any transcen-
dental principle, because the presumption of the exclusive dominance
of self-interest in human motivation was wrong in the first place; rather,
‘it appears, that a tendency to public good, and to the promoting of
peace, harmony, and order in society, does always, by affecting the
benevolent principles of our frame, engage us on the side of the social
virtues’ (Hume, 1998: 117).
Relying on experience thus leads Hume to posit the existence in the
human animal of ‘the benevolent principles of our frame’, a conclusion
that can indeed be called on to support the Deleuzian idea of a subjec-
tivity built on immanent terms. Yes, there are principles at stake, but
these principles are derived from the observation of human behaviour;
there is no recourse to anything outside the expected Humean toolkit
of habit, convention, and association. It’s no big mystery that humans
act altruistically; the only mystery is why we assumed this wasn’t part of
human nature in the first place. No transcendent principle is required
where no apparent barrier requires it.
This deflationary argument undercuts any a priori idea of justice, for
instance, for we see that ‘the rules of equity or justice depend entirely
102 William Egginton

on the particular state or condition, in which men are placed, and owe
their origin and existence to that UTILITY, which results to the public
from their strict and regular observance’ (Hume, 1998: 86). This obser-
vation leads us inexorably to the conclusion that removing or reversing
such a state or condition utterly obviates the need for a concept like
justice, such that ‘by rendering justice totally useless, you thereby totally
destroy its essence, and suspend its obligation upon mankind’ (Hume,
1998: 86). The radical nature of this argument should not be underes-
timated. If a foundational moral principle like justice can be shown to
be derived merely from context-dependent social utility such that the
removal or reversal of contingent conditions would destroy its essence
and suspend its obligatory force, then much of Hume’s argument against
the transcendence of moral principles has been validated. And if moral
principles are immanent to human behaviour and derive merely from
the sedimentation of useful rules and conventions, then the very idea
that some barrier might challenge interpersonal communications and
thus require transcendent principles begins to lose force. Moreover,
the solid grounding of morals on existing human mores is, ultimately,
profoundly conservative. Contestatory gesture, or a politics that would
question the very legitimacy of established mores, would appear to be
excluded; utopian projects based on a rejection of the status quo disap-
pear from the realm of theoretical possibilities.
As powerful as his case appears, though, the very argumentative
strategy Hume uses ultimately undermines his position. In order to
make his case for the context-dependent status of moral principles,
Hume deploys a series of thought experiments intended to illustrate
contexts in which principles would cease to make sense because their
social utility would vanish. It is worth quoting one at length:

Again; suppose, that, though the necessities of the human race

continue the same as at present, yet the mind is so enlarged, and
so replete with friendship and generosity, that every man has the
utmost tenderness for every man, and feels no more concern for his
own interest than for that of his fellows: It seems evident, that the
USE of justice would, in this case, be suspended by such an extensive
benevolence, nor would the divisions and barriers of property and
obligation have ever been thought of. Why would I bind another, by
a deed or promise, to do me any good office, when I know that he
is already prompted, by the strongest inclination, to seek my happi-
ness, and would, of himself, perform the desired service; except the
hurt, he thereby receives, be greater than the benefit accruing to
 The Eradication of Transcendence 103

me? In which case, he knows, that, from my innate humanity and

friendship, I should be the first to oppose myself to his imprudent
generosity. Why raise land-marks between my neighbor’s field and
mine, when my heart has made no division between our interests;
but shares all his joys and sorrows with the same force and vivacity as
if originally my own? (Hume, 1998: 84)

Hume is perfectly aware that the picture he draws is fanciful, but he

claims this fiction to be a mere matter of degree, not kind, citing in his
favour the closeness of families and the alliance of interests between
married couples. But is it not now clear where the slight of hand has
taken place? The picture Hume paints is not simply an exaggerated idyll
of brotherly community; it is literally inhuman. No matter how close
our relations and how great our love for one another, human experience
remains, in a fundamental sense, defined by the fact that I cannot share
my neighbour’s joys and sorrows with the same force and vivacity he
does, that I cannot know what ultimately prompts him, that my heart
always recognizes some division between my own and others’ interests.
This picture, in other words, is already an affective fantasy projection
motivated by the more profound and existential experience of human
finitude that is the ground zero of subjectivity.
That finitude both limits human possibilities of knowledge and opens
human possibilities of imagination. A politics based on the reduction of
essential opacity treats itself and its consequences as the only possibili-
ties for right action. It naturalizes the current state of relations, implic-
itly claiming that state to be related to (because grounded in) a natural
human condition – one in which, for instance, there is no division
between human interests. But of course there are divisions, and violent
ones at that. The property owner’s perspective espoused by Hume is thus
built into the very foundations of the liberal tradition, and its apparent
emancipation from political theology masks an, at times, even greater
(because more clandestine) servitude to the interests of capital.
This is an insight that did not escape one of the earliest and greatest
defenders of liberal capital. Adam Smith begins his Theory of Moral
Sentiments, published some ten years after Hume’s book, by noting that,
‘As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can
form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving
what we ourselves should feel in the like situation’ (Smith, 2009: 13). Our
senses, as he continues, are incapable of feeling what another man feels,
as ‘they never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and
it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what
104 William Egginton

are his sensations’ (Smith, 2009: 13). Smith’s concern is that, without
a ‘source for the fellow-feeling of the misery of others’ (Smith, 2009:
14), there can be no basis for community, governance, or propriety of
action. Understanding the mechanism for this fellow-feeling, therefore,
becomes one of the key issues for political and moral theory.
Smith finds this mechanism in sympathy, and while he acknowledges
that it is based in bodily affect and that discrete affects have a capacity for
direct transmission, he distinguishes sympathy as relying on the media-
tion of the subject’s imagination of himself in the place of another1:

Even our sympathy with the grief or joy of another, before we are
informed of the cause of either, is always extremely imperfect. General
lamentations, which express nothing but the anguish of the sufferer,
create rather a curiosity to inquire into his situation, along with some
disposition to sympathize with him, than any actual sympathy that
is very sensible. The first question that we ask is, What has befallen
you? Till this be answered, though we are uneasy both from the vague
idea of his misfortune, and still more from torturing ourselves with
conjectures about what it may be, yet our fellow-feeling is not very
considerable. (Smith, 2009: 16)

If our fellow-feeling or sympathy for another depends on the media-

tion of our understanding of his situation, and specifically in the form
of imagining ourselves in that situation, the corollary of this media-
tion is that our own sense of morality and ability to distinguish right
from wrong is irreducibly subjective. I make judgements concerning the
morality of my own conduct, in other words, only in so far as I can
externalize myself and view my actions as if I were another. As Smith
puts it, ‘we either approve or disapprove of our own conduct, according
as we feel that, when we place ourselves in the situation of another
man, and view it, as it were, with his eyes and from his station, we
either can or cannot entirely enter into and sympathize with the senti-
ments and motives which influenced it’ (Smith, 2009: 133). We imagine
ourselves as others in order to form the fellow-feeling that motivates
selfless action, just as we internalize the perspective of others in order
to judge our own conduct.2 But this projection of the self, out of its
own circumstances into those of another, is a transcendence of the
self-born of the inescapable transcendence of others. Among the very
founding texts of liberalism, in other words, commingled with attempts
to found politics on something other than theology, we see an implicit
and at times explicit recognition that politics cannot be self-contained
 The Eradication of Transcendence 105

or immanently grounded; politics must, it seems, include within its very

justification an unoccupied space. It is only the discourse justifying poli-
tics that strives to fill that space and does so either with the explicit will
of revealed religion or the surreptitious interests of the powerful.

Theology and unframed politics

For Lilla, the time of the ‘Great Separation’ is unique in human history:
‘before Rousseau, whenever Christian theologians disputed these matters
[theological truth claims] they took their assertions to be absolutely true
on the basis of reason and revelation, independent of man’ (Lilla, 2007:
123–124). But this assertion ignores a vital streak of theological thought
running from Plotinus through Augustine, Maimonides, and even Aquinas,
and whose indelible imprint made its way into Kant and Hegel’s thought
via Luther. Maimonides only gets passing mention in Lilla’s treatment,
specifically as an example of how Jewish theology lay down ‘strict rules
for judging prophets’ (Lilla, 2007: 69). But, from the neo-Platonists and
himself, Maimonides inherited, developed, and passed on to theologians
and philosophers who followed him a powerfully critical attitude toward
humanity’s capacity for understanding the will of God. Maimonides
wrote his Guide for the Perplexed to ‘enlighten a religious man’ who is ‘lost
in perplexity and anxiety; because his ‘moral and religious duties’ have
come into conflict with ‘his philosophical studies’. The religious man is
convinced of the truths he learns through science, and thus ‘finds it diffi-
cult to accept as correct the teaching based on the literal interpretation
of the Law’. Maimonides solves the problem by insisting that the Torah
and the Midrashim be interpreted based on an understanding of words as
having multiple meanings. In other words, because we believe scripture
to be the language of God as opposed to a human language, we fail to
make scripture compatible with human reason. The religious man errs
when he assumes the language of the Torah to be a truly divine language,
for which every word would signify exactly one aspect of the world. No
language can have that status. And this critique is formulated precisely
in the discourse of theology. When language is deployed pragmatically
in everyday contexts it seldom encounters its inherent limitations.
Buttressed by context, words disregard their homonymic limitations and
seem to do a fine job of more or less unambiguously designating objects
of cognition. The totality of being, past and present, however, could never
be an object of cognition. Cognition, perception, and descriptions are
activities that take place in space and time and have no ability to make
judgements outside space and time.
106 William Egginton

For a theologian such as Maimonides, ‘God’ names an ungraspable

totality, a creative force untamable by the human intellect. ‘The Torah
speaks according to the language of man’, he quotes, ‘that is to say,
expressions, which can easily be comprehended and understood by all,
are applied to the Creator. Hence the description of God by attributes
implying corporeality, in order to express His existence; because the
multitude of people do not easily conceive existence unless in connec-
tion with a body’ (Maimonides, n.d.). He clarifies by adding that most
people would not deny God the ability to move, but they would justifi-
ably ridicule the idea of the Creator sitting down for a nice plate of pasta
and a glass of Chianti. ‘In fact’, Maimonides points out, ‘it makes no
difference whether we ascribe to God eating and drinking or locomotion;
but according to human modes of expression, that is to say, according
to common notions, eating and drinking would be an imperfection in
God, while motion would not, in spite of the fact that the necessity of
locomotion is the result of some want’ (Maimonides, n.d.).
Assertive secularists and religious fundamentalists succumb to the
same error – that of assuming that human knowledge and the sort of
knowledge God would have are of the same nature.

A doubt has been raised, however, of whether His thought includes

the infinite ... Philosophers ... have decided that the object of knowl-
edge cannot be a non-existing thing, and that it cannot comprise
that which is infinite. Since, therefore, God’s knowledge does not
admit of any increase, it is impossible that he should know any tran-
sient thing. (Maimonides, n.d.)

By applying the same logic to static things we end up asserting that God
is an idiot. How did we get to this point? Merely because we assumed
that God knows things in a way similar to how we know things: ‘The
cause of the error of all these schools is their belief that God’s knowledge
is like ours’ (Maimonides, n.d.).
In the context of Christian theology, no Church father is more
central to Catholic doctrine than Saint Thomas Aquinas, and yet key to
Aquinas’s concept of faith is how it differs from matters of the intellect,
that is, how it differs from our view of knowledge. For Aquinas, faith is
certain; but it is vital to note how he contrasts the supposed certainty
of faith with that of knowledge. In the Summa Theologica, he considers
and rejects three challenges to the claim that faith may have a greater
certainty than the intellectual virtues. The first of these is the most
important: while scientific knowledge can be certain about its object,
 The Eradication of Transcendence 107

faith often suffers from doubt, and as doubt is to certainty as blackness

is to whiteness, scientific knowledge must be more certain than faith.
Aquinas’s response speaks volumes about his conception of the relation
between faith and knowledge: ‘This doubt is not on the part of the cause
of faith, but on our part, in so far as we do not fully grasp matters of
faith with our intellect. ... Matters of faith are above the human intellect,
while the above three virtues [wisdom, science, and the understanding]
are not’ (Aquinas, n.d.). Faith, that is to say, can be certain only in those
areas of life not subject to our intellect, areas where we cannot obtain
knowledge by dialogue, measurement, or analysis. In the heart of scho-
lastic Christian doctrine, in other words, centuries before Kant was to
famously impose ‘limits on knowledge in order to make room for faith’,
Saint Thomas Aquinas had already separated the two.
If Hume, Hobbes, and Locke are the heroes of Lilla’s story, Jean Jacques
Rousseau and Immanuel Kant have a more ambivalent role to play.
Powerful Enlightenment thinkers themselves, their move to understand
the religious impulse instead of reject it outright leads them ultimately
to inject into modernity a dangerous toleration for the other shore. As
Lilla puts it, ‘Kant was a philosopher, not a theologian, but the concepts
and vocabulary he developed for analyzing the sources and implications
of religious belief came very close to theology – so close that contem-
porary German theologians immediately seized on his work as a means
of legitimating a new kind of language for discussing the divine nexus’
(Lilla, 2007: 112). Because of the crucial nature of German thought,
in particular to the development of political theory in the nineteenth
century, this deviation as represented by Rousseau and especially Kant
takes on a special importance: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that, together,
Rousseau and Kant caused the major rift between Anglo-American and
continental European approaches to modern political thought. ... We
still live with the consequences of that rift today’ (Lilla, 2007: 113).
For Lilla, Kant’s reading of Rousseau’s Emile inflects his thought from
the outset; while the majority of Kant’s writings lead one to believe that
he shared Locke’s more limited hope for a basic toleration between reli-
gions as the condition for civil government, Kant’s ‘argument about the
sources and nature of moral religion, so different from those of Locke
and the deists, forced him onto a different path when it came to the
ultimate value of the Christian churches’ (Lilla, 2007: 155). While it
is true that Kant ultimately defends Christianity as ‘the true universal
church’, I would argue that the deference to religion in his writing is not
symptomatic of a deviation; rather, the room Kant famously made for
faith at the very core of his philosophy bears witness to an awareness
108 William Egginton

in his thought, extending and building on that of prior generations

of philosophers and theologians, that human knowledge is of essence
limited when it comes to the ability to understand the entirety of exist-
ence. Kant’s religious anthropology in other words, does not force him
onto a different path so much as corroborate a philosophical position
that is essential to his thought, and that we see operational in the very
core of the response to Hume and Leibniz that inspire his Critique of Pure
Reason.
According to Gottfried Leibniz, were two things to be alike in every
possible way, they would not in fact be two things but one thing. For
Kant, this principle bespoke Leibniz’s failure to distinguish between
appearances and how things are in themselves. If the principle of the
identity of indiscernibles were valid, Kant argued, it could be so only for
an entirely intellectual world independent of space, and time, the forms
of intuition through which we come to know the world. Appearances, in
contrast, need space and time to be manifest and thus must be discern-
ible from one another even while the identity of their referent remained
the same. We must, in other words, be capable of discerning self-iden-
tical objects in space and time in order to perceive them as objects in
the first place.
For Leibniz, then, the world is identical to the idea of the world, or
what we could call its code. For any self-identical entity there is a specific
code, and the repetition of that code would entail the repetition of all
its possible attributes and would thus result in its exact reproduction.
Leibniz’s theory is thus based on the belief that the world is equivalent
to its information, which was why he engaged in the popular seven-
teenth-century project for the creation of a perfect, rational language.
The search for the perfect language – and the conviction underlying it
that the world could indeed be the expression of a single language or
master code – is an old one, indeed, and had been primarily the work
of theologians hoping to discover trace back the language of God. By
adopting this search to his purposes, Leibniz was translating into a
scientific framework religious and philosophical convictions that dated
from the earliest foundations of Western culture.
While the ideology underlying the idea of the world as a kind of code
was often religious, it would be wrong to believe that the resistance to
this idea sprung from a scepticism toward religious belief. In fact, belief
in the underlying code of the world has informed secular thought as
profoundly as it has informed religious thought. Equally true, however,
is how real possibilities of resistance to this notion of the world as code
 The Eradication of Transcendence 109

have developed from a tradition of scepticism within theology of the

idea that creation is reducible to a kind of knowledge even, in principle,
accessible to human beings.
Although both Leibniz and Kant were religious in that their philos-
ophies assumed the existence of God, they also each represent one
possible path for secular humanism. For the Leibnizian approach,
everything we sense is reducible to a code, an underlying language
that, when unlocked, can give us access to the universe as it really is.
Once the code is understood, secrets as impenetrable as the conscious-
ness of another human being will be opened to us. Scepticism toward
such an objectifying view of human being is what differentiates the
Kantian from the Leibnizian path. For Kant, when we make observa-
tions of the world, we can only do so in time and space, but that we do
so tells us nothing about the world as it really is, independent of those
observations.
For Kant, God functions what he calls as a regulative ideal, a supple-
ment to our thought necessary for arriving at truths about the world
and for governing our actions. But aside from believing in God in this
way, Kant insists that we can no more know God’s will than we can
know the universe as it is itself. By believing in God in this way and not
believing that we can know his will, Kant argues that we accomplish
something quite vital. Beliefs about metaphysical truths that we hold
strictly separate from our actual knowledge about the world can free
us to pursue science and politics unimpeded by dogma and fanaticism.
Concomitantly, decoupling belief in from any requirement for demon-
strable evidence can allow for tolerance between faiths and, eventually,
even peace among nations. None of this is to say that Kant’s own preju-
dice toward Christianity, and his even more troubling prejudice against
Jews, is either defensible morally or unimportant for intellectual history.
The point is rather to insist that Kant’s recuperation in philosophical
form of the transcendental dimension of human experience was, in a
sense, logically prior to his religious anthropology and not the other
way around. Thus, while it may be the case, as Lilla argues, that Kant’s
thought laid the groundwork for a ‘new, and thoroughly modern, polit-
ical theology’ (Lilla, 2007: 140), the core of his philosophical contri-
bution lies elsewhere, and contributes to a philosophical scepticism
toward totalizing discourses that may aid in undermining both religious
fundamentalisms as well as those forms of thought that seek to exclude
from the field of consideration all real alternatives to those political and
economic models that undergird the existing modern world system.
110 William Egginton

Democracy and hermeneutic theology

Marx’s assessment of the political value of religion was famously

unambiguous. But more recent critical thought has been less inclined
to dismiss religious practice and belief wholesale as the opiate of the
masses. The postmodern turn in theology has notable progressive affini-
ties, and openly leftist and, in some cases, self-proclaimed communist
thinkers have publically espoused a return to theological question or
even aspects of specific religious traditions.3 It is not my aim to review
these various positions here; rather, in this concluding section I will
propose an argument, based on the previous critique of the dialogic
assumptions of Lilla’s defence of secularism, for how and why contem-
porary leftist thought finds a real basis for solidarity with at least a
certain kind of religious belief.
In their important recent book Hermeneutic Communism (2011), Gianni
Vattimo and Santiago Zabala lay the groundwork for both a thorough-
going critique of and potentially resistance to what they term ‘framed
democracy’. According to Vattimo and Zabala, scientific rationalism,
along with philosophical realism, are forms of thought complicit with
the maintenance of power by entrenched elites. As they write,

A politics of description does not impose power in order to dominate

as a philosophy; rather, it is functional for the continued existence
of a society of dominion, which pursues truth in the form of imposi-
tion (violence), conservation (realism), and triumph (history). These
metaphysically framed political systems hold that society must direct
itself according to truth (the existing paradigm), that is, in favor of
the strong against the weak. Only the strong determine truth, because
they are the only ones that have the tools to know, practice, and
impose it. (Vattimo and Zabala, 2011: 12)

The political form that society of dominion has assumed in the contem-
porary Western world is, of course, liberal democracy. But the elites
who benefit from the status quo are at pains to ensure that democracy
such as it is continues to support and sustain the system of privileges
that flow to them. Hence, the evolution of democracies in the modern
Western world, seat to the majority of the world’s multinational corpo-
rations, into often highly unrepresentative oligarchies where access to
the upper echelons of power is limited to a class defined by its extreme
and increasing wealth. The institutions and individuals complicit in
this system and its privileges then play an active role in assuring that
 The Eradication of Transcendence 111

democracy does not become more democratic than its current mani-
festation; alternatives are excluded from the framework that defines
adequately functioning formal democracy.
Certainly secularists are correct when they decry religious funda-
mentalists as being a threat to democracy. Any discourse that deter-
mines in advance the nature of truth and who has access to that truth
is by definition a threat to democracy. But what is often masked by the
stand-off between secularism and its ‘irrationalist’ opponents is how
the unquestioned nature of secularism’s own framing of truth claims,
while complicit with framed democracy, is in fact also a threat to
unframed democracy, or what Derrida called the ‘democracy to come’.
This is why the communism of Vattimo and Zabala’s title is at once
hermeneutic and limited to the status of a Kantian regulative idea. It
is hermeneutic because, as the authors write, hermeneutics is the very
essence of politics:

If politics, as Hannah Arendt explained, is not exclusively conflicting

assertions of truth, claims to recognition, and power relations but
rather the action necessary to create a public realm in which indi-
viduals coexist freely while protecting the private space necessary for
their development, then hermeneutics is also political. It relies on a
plurality of individual developments, that is, active interpretations.
A philosophy that relies on a plurality of interpretations must avoid
not only any metaphysical claims to universal values, which would
restrict personal developments, but also that passive conservative
nature that characterizes descriptive philosophies in favor of action.
(Vattimo and Zabala, 2011: 77)

Hermeneutics is what happens externally and prior to metaphysical

framing; it is the container to the contained of framed democracy; and
it is what must be suppressed in order both for metaphysics and framed
democracy to establish their implicit claims to exclusive validity.
Communism is, then, the name for a democracy unframed, unleashed
from the constraints of prior metaphysical assumptions. In no way, then,
can this communism be related to the violent impositions of power that
assumed its mantle in the twentieth century. Communism from a herme-
neutic perspective can only ever be an incomplete, utopian project. It is
the very realization of hermeneutics in the political sphere, the attempt
to hold open the excluded spaces and populations of framed democracy,
so as to permit a modicum of ferment to undermine their self-certain
truths. As the authors write,
112 William Egginton

While we cannot imagine a world where communism is completed,

neither can we renounce this ideal as a regulative and inspiring prin-
ciple for our concrete decisions ... . Kant’s lesson of practical reason
also has this meaning: the union between virtue and happiness is not
only the end that gives meaning to moral actions but also something
impossible to carry out in the world. Nevertheless, this impossibility
does not remove the obligation toward the categorical imperative. In
sum, communism is utopia or, as Benjamin would have it, a ‘weak
messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim’. (Vattimo
and Zabala, 2011: 117)

The real threat to democracy is not the return of political theology;

political theology never really left us to begin with. It merely changed
its shape as sovereignty evolved through its several ‘passages’ on the
route from God to what Hardt and Negri (2000) called ‘Empire’. And
in a similar vein, Kant’s foray into religious anthropology was not
a deviation; his recognition of the ineradicable nature of the tran-
scendental dimension in human life was perhaps his key insight.
The interpretation of God as regulative idea was thus not a holdover
allowing an unfortunately remnant of unreason in his otherwise
secular system; it was the anchor stone to an edifice of thought that
recognized the dangers of fanaticism in all its forms. Making the goal
and beacon of our politics ‘something impossible in this world’ means
not shutting the door on a democracy that would be possible in this
world but that we don’t yet recognize. In the same way, valuing and
even promoting tolerant and pluralistic religious belief and practice
is a means of remaining attentive to other ways of knowing that may
not even have been discovered yet but that risk elimination under
the presumptive knowledge of secularism and its acceptable forms
of truth.

Notes
1. As Fonna Forman-Barzilai puts it, ‘Sympathy [for Smith] was a social practice
through which individuals who share physical space participate together in an
ordinary exchange of approbation and shame, and through repetitive interac-
tions over time learn to become ‘social’ – learn to adjust their passions to a
‘pitch’ commensurate with living in a society with others’ (Forman-Barzilai,
2010: 12–13).
2. As Marie Martin puts it, ‘Morality cannot be reduced to individual sentiment,
but must always refer, at least implicitly, to the sentiments of others’ (Martin,
1990: 112).
 The Eradication of Transcendence 113

3. Some examples of the trend would include Gianni Vattimo, Slavoj Žižek,
Jeffrey Robbins, John D. Caputo, Hent De Vries, Alain Badiou, and Carmelo
Dotolo, among many others.

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Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harris, S. (2004). The End of Faith. New York: Norton.
Hitchens, C. (2007). God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York:
Twelve.
Hume, D. (1998). Trans. by T.L. Beauchamp, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles
of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jakobsen, J.R. and Pellegrini, A. (eds) (2008). Secularisms. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Kant, I. (1998). P. Guyer and A.W. Wood (eds) Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Leibniz, G.W. (1898). Trans. by R. Latta,’Monadology.’ Online source, available
at http://philosophy.eserver.org/leibniz-monadology.txt [last accessed 2 May
2012].
Lilla, M. (2007). The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. New
York: Knopf.
Maimonides, M. (no date). ‘Guide for the Perplexed.’ Internet Sacred Text Archive
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htm [last accessed 2 May 2012].
114 William Egginton

Martin, M.A. (1990). ‘Utility and Morality: Adam Smith’s Critique of Hume.’
Hume Studies 16(2), 107–120.
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For? London: Verso.
6
The Unprecedented Return of
Saint Paul in Contemporary
Philosophy
Gregg Lambert

The conceptual relationship between crisis (krisis) and critique (krinein)

in post-Kantian philosophy, pronounced most forcefully by Husserl in
the opening lectures of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, is well known to most readers of contemporary philos-
ophy. ‘The difficulty that has plagued human psychology’, Husserl
writes, ‘[and] not just in our time but for centuries – its own peculiar
‘crisis’ – ... leads [us] back to the enigma of subjectivity itself and thus is
inseparably bound to the enigma of psychological subject matter and
method’ (Husserl, 1970). The question I will turn to in this discussion is
whether the contemporary crisis announced under the term of the ‘post-
secular’, referring in this sense to the decline of scientific method and
the return of something akin to a ‘faith position’ expressed by certain
contemporary philosophies, is remarkably different than the earlier
crisis between the humanistic disciplines – including modern philos-
ophy (Geisteswissenschaften) – and the positivistic sciences announced
by Husserl in 1936 and, even earlier, the crisis between faith and reason
during the period of the Enlightenment? In taking up this question –
What’s this postsecular crisis all about? – I will turn to examine the writ-
ings of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou around the
somewhat emblematic figure of Saint Paul.
My argument will be that ‘the return of Paul’ on the contempo-
rary scene, spurred on by the recent readings of the Pauline figure by
Agamben and Badiou (and by Žižek, to a lesser degree), represents a
postsecular (i.e., post-scientific) response to the perceived crisis of philo-
sophical subjectivity that has emerged alongside the decline of what
has gone under the name of ‘Critical Theory’ (or simply ‘theory’) in

115
116 Gregg Lambert

North America and elsewhere (in short, the anti-humanistic traditions

of primarily German and French philosophy). What I am defining as
‘postsecular,’ in this moment, occurs when the subject of philosophy
is grounded in something resembling a ‘form of faith’ and no longer
on a scientific principle of reason, which has been reduced in the post-
modern period to being merely one ‘fable’ among others (i.e., ideology).
This does not mean that all philosophy thereby becomes religious, or
nostalgically assumes a pious stance with regard to the world (even
though this has certainly happened), but rather concerns the manner
in which philosophy assumes a subjective form of certainty concerning
its own truth claims in contradistinction to the truth procedures of the
other sciences.
First, let us recall Heidegger’s earlier claim that philosophy is not
opposed to theology but rather to faith as ‘a subjective form of exist-
ence’ (Heidegger, 1998: 41). This is because, for Heidegger, philosophy is
‘factically ever changing,’ whereas he understands religious faith as the
inward or subjective form of existence that is characterized by something
like permanent conviction, or belief (pistis). In other words, the philoso-
pher’s convictions are historically ever changing because philosophers
constantly change their minds about philosophy’s own truth procedures,
to employ Badiou’s term, and this is especially evident in the case of the
procedures invented by earlier philosophers, which undergo constant
revision. By contrast, for Heidegger, the form of existence defined by
faith is founded upon a set of firm convictions that are impervious (at the
very least, resistant and sometimes openly hostile) to a complete ‘trans-
formation of mind’ (metanoia) that appears as the historical condition of
philosophy’s ever-changing appearance, since such a change would also
necessarily imply the destruction of the subject (of faith), that is, the
subjective core of a belief system. Therefore, to change one’s faith entails
something more radical than a mere change in opinion, since the truth
of propositions may change over time but do not require the complete
‘destruction’ of the subject (subiectum) that underlies them. It is for this
reason that Heidegger claims that faith is the ‘mortal enemy’ (todfeind)
of the form of existence that is called philosophy.1
In the contemporary moment, however, it appears that it is the facti-
cally ever-changing nature of truth claims that now appear as the entire
problem of philosophy’s own subjective form of existence and authority,
especially in light of the ever-changing, multiple, and shifting identities
belonging to globalized societies (to paraphrase a refrain often made by
Žižek). Today philosophy appears bereft of the power to brand its own
truth claims with the stamp of the Real that was formerly provided by
 Unprecedented Return of Saint Paul 117

its earlier claim to the idea of Reason, or by adherence to a form of scien-

tific method, as in the case of the phenomenology. Even in the so-called
postmodern period, the appeal to a Structuralist method, or to the ‘logic
of the Signifier,’ still assumed the epistemological form of a ‘Science of
the Subject,’ especially in psychoanalysis and Althusserian Marxism. It is
in this context, perhaps, that we might regard a contemporary philoso-
pher like Badiou who resolves to transform the subjective form of philos-
ophy by exchanging the principle of reason for a firmer foundation of
faith (or what I would as a postsecular form of ‘conviction,’ which is not
religious in principle). For Badiou, moreover, this gesture represents the
‘heroic’ effort to vindicate the militant subjectivity of Marxist-Leninist
critique against competing truth procedures, especially those that have
been formulated most successfully in Europe and the United States in
the contemporary period by feminist and minority critiques under the
banner of what he will call a Levinasian ‘ethics of difference’, which I
will return to discuss below (Badiou, 1993).
But first, why Paul? In other words, how does Pauline Christianity
provide a foundation for the new Universalism proclaimed by an atheist
and Marxist philosopher like Badiou? Although this might appear some-
what paradoxical, at first glance, the answer will be found in the implicit
parallelism between the ‘Christ-event’ proclaimed by Paul in 1 CE and
the truth event of Marx proclaimed by Badiou, which can only be under-
stood by subtracting, as a condition of this claim, any reference to an
historical reality or ‘objective aggregate’ of facts. Some of these facts
would include, as the editors of this volume have already commented,
the role played by former Eastern European churches in the historical
defeat of Communism and the subsequent reappraisal of religious
activism, in addition to ‘the serious questioning of the militant atheism
of the previous Marxist tradition’ (Badiou, 1993: xx). To this I would
only add the global consequences that both precipitated and followed
the collapse of the Soviet Union: the political bankruptcy and gradual
‘senilization’ of any remaining Marxist-Leninist or Maoist regimes,
which only appear as what Althusser called ‘survivals’ (survivants) in a
world increasingly ruled by neoliberal principles of ‘governmentality’
(Foucault).
In the context of Badiou’s own argument, given the parallelism
that he finds between our contemporary world and the world of the
first century (CE), the truth procedure invented by Paul to establish
the subjective foundation of a Universalist identity (i.e., an identity
without any ‘identitarian characteristics’) in response to his own
political and cultural situation, may provide the necessary strategy to
118 Gregg Lambert

guarantee the survival of his own ‘critical’ position in contemporary

neoliberal society, especially in view of the role played by the United
States in his cosmic allegory. ‘Paul’s unprecedented gesture,’ Badiou
writes, ‘consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp,
be it that of a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a social class’
(Badiou, 2003: 5). Likewise, in order to avoid being defeated on the
basis of ‘mere facts’, our contemporary militant philosopher must
first devise a method of subtracting his own truth procedure from any
current historical circumstances in establishing its claim of proof, or
certainty, since it is faith (or rather, ‘conviction’) and not reason that
also grasps the nature of the truth event as a subjective form of exist-
ence, ‘an event whose only “proof” lies in its having been declared by
a subject’ (Badiou, 2003: 5).
What, then, is the so-called truth procedure invented by Paul that
Badiou reduces, on the one hand, to an ‘unprecedented gesture’ (a pure
act without foundation in previous tradition) and, on the other hand,
to a ‘pure element of Saying’ (pointe de fable)? Certainly, Paul’s original
gesture consists in subtracting the entire narrative of the historical
Jesus of Nazareth (including the narrative of the life of Jesus given in
the gospels, as well as everything that Jesus said) and in reducing the
‘Christ-event’ to one pointed Saying: ‘Jesus is resurrected!’2 Of course,
this ‘pure element of Saying’ cannot be understood philosophically as
a proposition, as Badiou rightly observes, but rather in the strongest
sense as a proclamation of faith in the event (which would not be accu-
rately captured as ‘belief’ in the usual sense accorded to the Greek word
pistis). At the same time, as a self-proclaimed atheist, Badiou does not
merely seek to repeat the content of Paul’s original statement either,
since the reality of the resurrected Christ is declared to be a ‘fiction,’
according to the secondary meaning of fabula, as he defines it, a residue
that still clings to the pure element of Saying and is mediated by the
Imaginary (Badiou, 2003: 5). Stripped of its ‘fabulous content’, there-
fore, and ‘unburdened by all the imaginary that surrounds it’, what is
retained is only the pure element of the Saying itself. Although the form
of this faith is certainly ‘religious’ (and it is philosophical only in its
own unique ‘fable’), it is consciously a religious form stripped of its reli-
gious ‘fable’ (i.e., its fiction, or genre, is form of Saying), one in which
‘conviction’ replaces ‘faith’ (pistis), the subject of militant conviction
replaces the subject of love (agape, or charity), and the subjective form
of ‘certainty’ replaces ‘hope’ (elpis) (Badiou, 2003: 5).
What exactly is this element? Again, it is the unprecedented and heter-
ogeneous nature of the ‘truth event’ first introduced by Paul as both a
 Unprecedented Return of Saint Paul 119

form of thought but also the act of declaring the truth of this thought,
which is violently posed against two other world views that Paul is in
a struggle to extricate the meaning of a Christian form of existence:
the Greek and the Jewish moral universes. As early Christian scholar
Wayne A. Meeks writes: ‘The novelty of the proclamation [Saying, pointe
de fable], which violates or at least transcends expectations based on
either reason or on Jewish traditions (1 Cor. 1:18–25), permits it to serve
as a warrant for innovation’ (Meeks, 1983: 180, emphasis mine).
In this regard, Badiou is completely accurate in his reading of the
meaning of the statement ‘Jesus is resurrected!’ as a radical departure
from both moral and philosophical systems that renders the subjective
element of a distinctively Christian ‘life’ (zoe), one that is ‘indifferent’
(in a word) to the former determinations of the flesh (sarx) under Jewish
law, and the natural predisposition of things and persons to come or
‘to return to their own place’ according to Greek wisdom. The event
proclaimed by Paul could never exist in either universe, which becomes
the basis for the heterogeneity of the Christian form of existence as a
new determination of life (zoe), no longer predicated on the previous
ethnological and cultural characteristics of kinship and class. As Meeks
writes, ‘In particular, Paul uses the paradox of the Messiah’s crucifixion
explicitly to support the union of Jew and gentile and the abolition
of the distinction between them, by bringing to an end the boundary
setting function of the Torah’ (Meeks, 1983: 180).
In his own argument, Badiou employs the Pauline ‘paradox’ as the
foundation for a new form of Universalism, defined as a militant subjec-
tive form of a ‘[radical] indifference that tolerates differences’ (Badiou,
2003). In other words, he uses the ‘unprecedented gesture’ of Paul in the
form of a precedent (as one also says in legal jurisprudence) to found
his own gesture on another fable – the revolutionary fable of the truth
event first proclaimed by Marx. It is around this point, however, that
the explicit parallelism that Badiou seeks to establish between the heroic
(and fanatical) subject of Paul, who proclaims the truth event of the
resurrected Christ, and the subject of ‘he who proclaims the pure event’
(i.e., the subject of Badiou himself?) becomes overtly contrived, which
is one reason why Badiou elides in his account the second part of the
Pauline saying: ‘Christ is Lord’ (meaning also that all Christians are to
be understood as ‘slaves to Christ’).
I have already established above the two senses of the ‘fable’ by which
Badiou determines the ‘Christ-event’ of St Paul as an allegorical means
of addressing the situation of crisis in contemporary philosophy. Of
course, allegory is a type of fable often employed in moral philosophy,
120 Gregg Lambert

which Badiou’s own discourse unquestioningly is. How we know it is

allegorical is explicitly stated in the ‘situation’ to which this discourse
is addressed, when Badiou writes that Paul’s original discourse speaks
directly to us from out of the same conditions as the Roman Empire’s
period of increasing despotism and militarism, which is represented in
our time by the United States:

By transplanting Paul, along with all his statements, into our century,
one sees them encountering there a real society every bit as criminal
and corrupt, but infinitely more supple and resistant, than that of the
Roman Empire. (Badiou, 2003: 5)

Moreover, in his own allegorical identification with the figure of St Paul,

Badiou also might also appear to us today as ‘heroic’, ‘fanatical’, or even
as a ‘zealot’. Simply put, Paul was also a self-defined zealot for Christ
in the same manner that Badiou remains a zealot for Lenin and Mao,
and particularly against those who would declare this conviction to be
a ‘folly’, given the evidence against this system of belief and the disap-
pearance of the peoples that marked its historical existence. However, it
is only in the peculiar sense of heroism employed by Badiou to describe
his own ‘situation’ vis-à-vis that of Paul that the saying ‘Jesus is resur-
rected!’ is given its true meaning as allegory.
Returning now to Badiou’s appropriation of the original Pauline argu-
ment that ‘there is no distinction between Greek and Jew,’ this argument
is only valid if we also fully accept the following claim as a condition: that
the ‘new type of subject’ proclaimed by Badiou (‘for him who considers
that the real is pure event’) fulfils and, at the same time, ‘cancels out’
the reality of all ethnic and cultural identity in the same manner that,
as in the argument of Paul, Christ came to fulfil and thereby to satisfy
the laws of the Torah, bringing them to closure through the inaugura-
tion of a new subject for whom the continued recognition of ethnic and
cultural differences would now have an anachronistic and ‘backward’
meaning (Badiou, 2003: 57).3 In other words,

To declare the nondifference between Greek and Jew establishes

Christianity’s potential universality; to found the subject as division,
rather than the perpetuation of a tradition, renders the subjective
element adequate to this universality by terminating the predicative
particularity of cultural subjects. There is no doubt that universalism,
and hence the existence of any truth whatsoever, requires the destitu-
tion of established differences and the initiation of a subject divided in
 Unprecedented Return of Saint Paul 121

itself by the challenge of having nothing but the vanished event to

face up to. (Badiou, 2003: 57–58, emphasis mine)

It is only upon assuming the full reality of this event, or this universal
‘subjective void’, that the subject is capable of ‘radical indifference’
in the face of which all identities will henceforth appear as fictions,
opinions of culture and tradition, and including the very phenomenal
appearance of racial and sexual characteristics, which are henceforth
regarded as the fictive projections of the Imaginary. Here, in many other
statements, Badiou actually reveals himself to be gnostic in his attitude;
thus, the cancellation of reality of cultural, racial, and sexual difference
is based on a prior denial of the reality of this world, which is ruled
by chaos and by demons. Here, it is crucial to note that for Badiou, as
for Paul, the greatest evil is belief in multiple identities, which poses
the greatest threat to the potential universality of the Subject. Multiple
identities are the little ‘daemons’ that rule in chaos; as Paul says, ‘one
cannot drink from the cup of Christ and the cup of demons at the same
time’ (that is, without contamination). It is around this final point that
Badiou’s identification of Levinas as the founder of a neoliberal ‘ethics
of difference’ also becomes somewhat contrived, if not a form of calcu-
lated subreption.
But secondly, why Levinas? In other words, why does Levinas’s ethical
philosophy appears as the object of Badiou’s most fervent critiques from
1993 onward, as the real antagonist and opponent, in an almost iden-
tical manner as the one who Paul calls ‘the Teacher’ in the letter to the
Galatians, whom he accuses of preaching ‘a fraudulent gospel’ (Meeks,
1983: 176)? In answering this question, first, as Badiou says often of the
relation Nietzsche-Paul, I will say of the relation Badiou-Levinas: that
the latter is more like a rival than a real enemy. The most critical differ-
ence between their philosophical systems only appears in a statement at
the end of Saint Paul, where Badiou declares ‘that in order for people to
be gripped by truth, it is imperative that universality not present itself
under the aspect of particularity’ (Badiou, 2003: 99). This argument is
made even more explicit in the passage that follows and provides the
very basis for the rhetorical strategy all along:

Against universalism conceived as the production of the Same, it

has recently been claimed that the latter found its emblem, if not
its culmination in the death camps, where everyone, having been
reduced to a body on the verge of death, was absolutely equal to
everyone else. This ‘argument’ is fraudulent. (Badiou, 2003: 109)
122 Gregg Lambert

Of course, Badiou’s criticisms of this clichéd understanding of Christian

universalism as being entirely responsible for the Holocaust and for
the reduction of all political life to ‘bare life’ are correct; in particular,
the camps were responsible for introducing completely new and exor-
bitant differences between absolute death and bare life into our ‘civili-
zation’ as actual, and not merely possible, forms of social and political
existence – and in the sense that they continue to remain a real possi-
bility for our political forms today and in the future (that is, unless
one believes that genocide is no longer possible as a political weapon).
Secondly, the Pauline formula of Christian universalism (based on the
fusion of community through love) cannot be reduced to Nazi ‘excep-
tionalism’. based on the exclusion and extermination of difference
from a community understood as a ‘closed substance, continuously
driven to verify its own closure, both in and outside itself, through
carnage’ (Badiou, 2003: 11). Nevertheless, the implication that the
ethical thought of Levinas, as perhaps the most systematic contem-
porary critique of ‘the production of the Same’, is the origin of this
point of view is also a type of fraud, or at the very least, a false testi-
mony perpetrated by Badiou himself. Strategically, as I noted above, it
constitutes a form of ‘subreption’, which, according to an older usage,
is the deliberate misstatement of facts in order to gain an ecclesiastical
advantage.
First, let us again recall that according to the etymology of the word
that exists in both Jewish and Greek systems, a fable is ‘saying’ (logos,
legein); however, for Levinas, the pure element of ‘Saying’ (Dire) is
expressed in a manner that cannot be reduced to ‘the said’ (le dit), and
thus also remains heterogeneous to every attempt to totalize its sense
within an order of nature or reason. It is in this sense of heterogeneity
that is already accorded to the pure element of the ‘truth event’, as we
have seen, that Badiou perceives the ethical fable of Levinas as the most
powerful rival to his own fable under the name of Paul:

For Paul, the Christ-event is heterogenous to the law, pure excess over
every prescription, grace without concept or appropriate rite. The real
can no more be what the elective exception becomes literalized in
stone as timeless law (Jewish discourse), than what comes or returns
to its place (Greek discourse) ... For him who considers that the real is
pure event, Jewish and Greek discourses no longer present, as they
continue to do in the work of Levinas, the paradigm of a major difference in
thought. This is the driving force behind Paul’s universalist conviction:
 Unprecedented Return of Saint Paul 123

that ‘ethnic’ or cultural difference, of which the opposition between

Greek and Jew is in his time and in the empire as a whole, the proto-
type, is no longer significant with regard to the real, or to the new
object that sets out a new discourse. No real distinguishes the first two
discourses any longer, and their distinction collapses into rhetoric. (Badiou,
2003: 57)

In the above passage I have underlined the surreptitious replacing of

the subject in the statement, ‘For him who considers that the real is pure
event,’ which no longer refers to Paul, nor even to the ‘Christ-event’
which is merely a fable but again to the subject of the pure universal
event of the Real without mediation. Here, we find the philosophy of
Levinas defined as ‘the paradigm of a major difference in thought’ – that
is, the ethical foundation for the ideology of the ‘right to difference’ and
what Badiou refers to as the ‘contemporary catechism of goodwill with
regard to “other cultures” (i.e., multi-culturalism)’ (Badiou, 1993: 20).4
To put it crudely, in the manner of Badiou, Levinas’s ethical philosophy
is responsible for what in the United States has gone under the name of
‘identity politics’, and in France from the early 1990s onward, for the
political appeals based on the recognition of the rights of immigrant
groups and other social minorities.
According to the terms of Badiou’s own argument, however, we
would need to affirm that Levinas’s ethical philosophy has actually
been successful in overturning the Greek logos by supplanting onto-
logical difference with ethical difference, thereby introducing a new
position of ‘critique’ into the contemporary philosophical genre. For
Levinas, as we know, difference is incarnated in ‘the face’, which is
anterior to the self-reflexive identity of the Ego with the other, either
as the coexistence of two terms in a ‘logical unity’, or in the form of a
‘transcendental apperception’ of an ultimate intentionality. Therefore,
ethical difference can only be phrased in the accusative mode, which
is derived from intersubjective space that is primordially asymmet-
rical; it is only in this manner that difference is introduced as severely
restricting the Ego’s own freedom and self-presence, thereby making
possible the two poles of obsession (eros) and nihilation (abaddon).
However, in order to understand Badiou’s claim that a Levinasian
conception of difference as ‘the paradigm of a major difference in
thought,’ we would first need to translate the above concepts into the
form of a truth procedure that would illustrate the concept of differ-
ence enacted by all forms of ‘identitarian politics’ today. Accordingly,
124 Gregg Lambert

the concept of difference is enacted or produced by something like the

following truth procedure:

1. Difference is introduced from the ‘position’ of an other who is deter-

mined in the pure element of Saying, in the epiphany of a face, and
whose ‘position’ expresses the essential asymmetry and exteriority of
all social relations;
2. Difference is expressed in the form of an accusative that is addressed
to the sovereign and atemporal position of the ‘I’, thereby making
this Subject ‘responsible to’ the very condition of exteriority and
alterity of the other (often described by Levinas in terms of privation
of being or poverty); and
3. The Saying (le Dire) of Difference becomes the formal occasion of
a truth procedure and the ‘conversion’ of the other into another
subject (in the act of self-nomination), and thus, all subsequent truth
procedures belonging to the name of the particular difference (le dit)
become the basis for the positive construction of both subjective
knowledge and social being (conatus).

Although this very schematic portrayal of a common truth procedure

can be easily recognized in many critical identity claims (of ethnic
minorities, for example, or in the history of feminist critique), we
should immediately recall Badiou’s admission that this schema ‘is strik-
ingly distant from Levinas’ actual conception of things.’ In point of fact,
Levinas would regard the third step in the truth procedure outlined
above as merely another instance of ‘the return into the Same’, whereby
‘one signifies the other and is signified by it’, and the one and the other
become the coexistence of two terms in the same theme, despite their
actual difference. For example, this often occurs when identity enters
in as a third term (e.g., a name) that mediates the one and the other in
a common theme, immersing the co-implication of different subjective
and temporal instances ‘in a collective representation, a common ideal,
or a common action’ (Levinas, 1978: 95).
From his earliest work, Existence and Existents (1947), Levinas does
argue that the space of thought cannot be separated, to be considered
in isolation, or even appear as the epiphenomenal distance from social
space (as in writing), inasmuch as characteristic of alterity that condi-
tions the appearance of thought is first introduced by the relationship
to others. In other words, the Ego as subject cannot endow itself with
its own alterity, its own temporal nothingness, that is, with the scintil-
lating alteration of presence and absence that first gives to the Ego the
 Unprecedented Return of Saint Paul 125

freedom to pull back from its engagement with the world without being
able withdraw completely. It is the original alterity of the other that first
creates this freedom and temporality as a possibility of existence, even though
this freedom can only exist in relation to the world of others. Otherwise,
Levinas asks, ‘[h]ow could time arise in a solitary subject?’

The solitary subject cannot deny itself; it does not possess nothing-
ness. ... This alterity comes to me only from the other. Therefore, is
not sociality something more than the source of our representation
of time: is it not time itself? ... The dialectic of time is the very dialectic
of the relationship with the other, that is, a dialogue which has to be
studied in terms other than those of the solitary subject. The dialectic
of the social relationship will furnish us with a set of concepts of a
new kind. And the nothingness necessary to time, which the subject
cannot produce, comes from the social relationship. (Levinas, 1978:
93–94)

In this passage we might find, in much plainer terms, the entire trajectory
of Levinas’s subsequent project, as well as a much clearer justification for
the precedence of the ‘ethical relation’ over the ontological, according
to a statement that appears later on that ‘ethics precedes ontology’. It
is this rich formulation, which unfortunately has been taken up in the
most threadbare and philosophically naïve manner by many contempo-
rary readers of Levinas, that will provide the basis of Badiou’s accusation
that it has become the ‘major paradigm of difference in thought’ for
ethnic and cultural expressions of particularism.
At this point, I will make two preliminary remarks that run contrary
to Badiou’s own conception of all things ‘Levinasian’. First, at least at
this stage of the phenomenological argument, there is little to suggest
that Levinas is attempting to erect a purely religious understanding of
ethics in place of a Greek and philosophical system, much less that the
origin of this understanding must be located in Jewish law. Second,
there is even less evidence to suggest that what Badiou labels as a ideo-
logical and culturalist assumption of multiculturalism, identity politics,
or of an ethical particularism that refuses to tolerate real differences
and seeks to suppress them under a neoliberal form of universalism.
Perhaps one could argue that both the primacy of a theological repre-
sentation of ‘the Other’ and of the characteristics of Jewish exception-
alism become features of his later works, which depart from an earlier
phenomenological understanding of these as themes. For Levinas, who
was Jewish, the concept of a pre-original anteriority of ‘the Other’ could
126 Gregg Lambert

be called ‘religious’, that is, ‘if the term itself did not also carry the risk
of becoming theological’ (Levinas, 1972: 80–81). However, in the earlier
work, Levinas already defines this anteriority strictly in terms of the
dialectic of the social relationship (which is equally a dialectic of tempo-
rality); at this point, it is only the social relationship that ‘will furnish us
with a set of concepts of a new kind’ (Levinas, 1978: 94).
In fact, Levinas would define the representations of theology among
the ‘hypostases of the Ego’, which fundamentally distort and cover
over the initial asymmetrical character of all social relations (for
example, between the child and the parent, or between genders, which
becomes the focus of the subsequent work of Totality and Infinity). In
both the earlier and the later works, in his analysis of the relationships
brought about by Eros as a ‘pathos of distance in proximity’ where the
asymmetrical nature of this duality of beings is maintained, Levinas
will also locate the primary asymmetrical relationship between the
enemy and the friend as key political concepts in which the asym-
metrical formations belonging to racism and ethnocentrism will be
determined as well. Thus, in the same but opposite measure that the
failure of communication in love constitutes the presence of the other
qua other as an object of obsession and desire, equally the failure of
communication in hostility and warfare constitutes the presence of the
stranger qua enemy as the object of impersonal hatred and derision.
In both subjective states, the other appears as the one who holds me
hostage and persecutes me, and in the case of the latter, the Ego can
only hope to escape by fusing its own being with the anonymous and
impersonal power of the collective, the group, the nation, the people,
or the race. ‘To this collectivity of comrades’, Levinas writes early on,
‘we contrast the I-you collectivity which precedes it. It is not partic-
ipation in a third term – intermediate person, truth, dogma, work,
profession, interest, dwelling, or meal; that is, it is not communion’
(Levinas, 1978: 95).
Here, given the explicit reference to the common ‘meal’ and
‘communion’ in this passage, that is, the Christian and subsequently
modern notions of ‘participation in the common’ (metaxia), I must
return now to provide some historical context for these criticisms by
supplying their direct object. The primary object of Levinas’s critique
in Existence and Existents is Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein with the
emphasis upon the solitary states of ek-static temporality in the expe-
riences of boredom, anxiety, and dread – that is, the existential states
of nothingness and nihilation of being that Levinas argues are neither
primordial, nor even ‘ontological’ forms of negation and nothingness.
 Unprecedented Return of Saint Paul 127

Again, this would presuppose that the solitary subject, subtracted from
all social space or intersubjective relations would be capable of giving to
itself the form of alterity (i.e., non-being), which is to say, the subjective
form of time itself.
Our relationship with others is the source of our own internal
consciousness of time, and it is the presence of others that is respon-
sible for introducing the nothingness from which the dynamism of
the ‘I’ (the Subject) appears in the very exigency of the present to
return; although the Ego is fundamentally passive in relation to this
dynamism and this exigency, and the solitary subject can only ‘dream,
perchance, sleep, to shuffle off its mortal coils’. In the simplest terms,
without any hint of spiritualism or divinity, it is the particular alterity
of the other that first gives to the Ego the possibility of non-being,
both the origin and the limit of its inalienable freedom as a subject,
which, contrary to an entire tradition of philosophy, the subject
cannot give to itself – not even in the form of a transcendental subjec-
tivity of the non-I, of a System or Structure, or of History. (Thus, if
there is any particularism in other, it cannot be embodied in a subject
or identity.) It is the concrete presence of others that first ‘positions’
the subject, but it is also the non-identity of the other with the Ego
that first gives the subject the ‘freedom to withdraw from others’;
however, as we have already seen, even the hope in community is
only a temporal withdrawal and forgetting of this primordial ‘posi-
tion’. Thus, paradoxically, the idea of fusion that informs the ‘we’ of
collectivity around a common object, a work, or a third term, is always
in danger of forgetting and potentially betraying the social relation to
others, later defined by Levinas in terms of passivity (which is not
simply passive), vulnerability (which is not merely emotional), and
responsibility (which is not only moral).
In some ways, Levinas’s priority of the relationship to the other as
primary form of alterity (of the splitting of the subject and the Ego)
shares many of the same principles as the psychoanalytic critique of the
subject, and I would only recall the prominence given to both pater-
nity and gender in the subsequent studies as the primary forms of inter-
subjectivity. More rigorously understood, therefore, the statement that
ethics precedes ontology must be understood as follows. ‘Intersubjective
space is initially asymmetrical’, Levinas writes:

The exteriority of the other is not an effect of space, which keeps sepa-
rate what conceptually is identical, nor is there some difference in the
concepts which would manifest itself through spatial exteriority. It is
128 Gregg Lambert

precisely inasmuch as it is irreducible to these two notions of exte-

riority that social exteriority is an original form of exteriority that
takes us beyond the categories of unity and multiplicity which are
valid for things [i.e., the primacy of social exteriority takes us beyond
ontology], that is, are valid in the world of an isolated subject, a
solitary mind. Intersubjectivity is not simply the application of the
category of multiplicity to the domain the mind [i.e., ‘the One-All’
and, ironically, here we have a good approximation of the principle
thesis of Badiou’s ontology]. It is brought about by Eros, where in the
proximity of another the distance is wholly maintained, a distance
whose pathos is made up of this proximity and this duality of beings.
(Levinas, 1978: 95)

In the above statement we are given the explicit connection between

ontology, the solitary subject (or cogito) and a world deprived or forgetful
of others. Consequently, ontology is a world without others, and can
only exist from the perspective of a solitary subject of the philosopher
who manages (even only temporarily or through creating a ‘fable’) to
withdraw from the world that is populated by other people, or to dream
of the ‘fusion of egos’ in the communion of community. As an aside, is
not Badiou our most solitary philosopher today as well?
Finally, Levinas was writing these arguments between 1940 and
1945 while he was a prisoner in the German concentration camp at
Hannover; during the same period, several members of his family were
being exterminated in concentration camps in his native Lithuania.
Given this historical political context, his rejection of the Heideggerian
analytic of Dasein, but particularly his severe criticism of the Mitsein-
andersein formulation in Being and Time (‘a collectivity of the with, and
around truth’ in an authentic form) are telling. Here, we must ask, what
would be the implicit relationship that is drawn between the existential
and solitary moods that are privileged in the earlier Heidegger, and the
Mitsein-andersein privilege of the authentic community of the German
people (volk) that belong to the same period of the philosopher’s work
and biography? Extending Levinas’s critique of the solitary subject who
cannot give nothingness to itself, from out of its own substance, can a
people (or a race) give to itself its own creative nothingness, which in
turn, will give birth to its unity in an ideal future? If only by implication,
Levinas suggests that this is only possible through a violent denial of the
primordial relationship to ‘others’, by a frenzied pathos for the creation
of a ‘proximity in distance’, by an Eros borne from the ideal of fusion
that belonged to National Socialism at this moment.
 Unprecedented Return of Saint Paul 129

To conclude, it is obvious that, according to Marxist dogma, there is

only one authentic species (Geshlecht) of social relationships that deter-
mine the asymmetrical organization of intersubjective social space, that
is, prior to and in ‘the final instance’ of all other forms of asymmetry:
the class relationship. In view of this ‘authentic’ social form of asym-
metry, all other species of inequality (between genders, ethnic groups,
minorities), as well as the different subjects of human rights, are fraudu-
lent and ‘imaginary’ projections of false consciousness produced by the
ideological machines controlled by the masters. (In this regard, Badiou,
like Žižek, is extremely Orthodox in his understanding of the priority
of class struggles and a politics based on the ‘non-recognition’ of any
other form of social inequality as ‘authentic’). However, perhaps the
faith in the existence of ‘authentic class’, or of an ‘authentic commu-
nity’ (a fraternity of comrades, or brothers and sisters in Christ), who
can rightfully claim the name of the universal, should yet again be
placed into question. The notion of an authentic community or people
bears the special status of a secular myth of modernity, one that was
born alongside the more archaic myths of nation and race, which are
like its shadows and populist forms. But again, Levinas’s critique of
the ‘authentic form’ of this collectivity that can only be found in the
solitary subject may have a renewed value for us today. Does not this
‘I-you’ collectivity return again in the political dyad of the friend-enemy
couple, which continues to un-found any potential universalism of the
collectivity of the ‘we’?
Returning now to our contemporary moment and to Badiou, his most
explicit criticism comes in Ethics (1993), written several years before
the work on Saint Paul, where Badiou states: ‘To put it crudely: Levinas’
enterprise serves to remind us, with extraordinary insistence, that every
effort to turn ethics into the principle of thought and action is essen-
tially religious’ (Badiou, 1993: 23). Here, we are given a stark alternative
between religious ethics and militant philosophy, which in some ways
recalls Heidegger’s somewhat ‘fundamentalist’ viewpoint concerning
the absolute hostility between faith and reason. As for Badiou, I suspect
that it is the apparent success of Levinas’s ethical principle of turning
thought into a virulent form of active differentiation that poses the
greatest problem for his own position of ‘anti-philosophy’: how to
combine the principle of thought and action in a pure element of Saying
that is not merely determined as the introduction of another subjective
production of difference in the worldly proliferation of alterities. As he
discovers in the unprecedented gesture of St Paul, it is only by laying
claim to the position of the Universal itself, and casting off all forms of
130 Gregg Lambert

relative difference, that this principle can be attained. Or, as he resolves

several years later in the conclusion of Saint Paul:

This is why, as Paul testifies in exemplary fashion, universalism, which

is an absolute (nonrelative) subjective production, indistinguishes
saying and doing, thought and power. Thought becomes universal only
in addressing itself to all others, and it effectuates itself as power through
this address. But the moment all, including the solitary militant, are
counted according to the universal, it follows that what takes place is
the subsumption of the Other to the Same. ... The production of equality
and the casting off, in thought, of differences are the material signs of the
universal. (Badiou, 2003: 109, my emphasis)

Nevertheless, I don’t think we can immediately accept this final claim

that the cancellation of all differences that is first proposed in thought
would be, in itself, sufficient to produce the material signs of equality
among all others. (This is merely another hypostasis of thought and
action in the philosophy of the Subject.) More critical, however, is the
claim that thought can address itself to all others, and then ‘effectu-
ating itself with power from this address.’ In fact, only Christian univer-
salism could allow us to imagine such a thought, the unprecedented
gesture of addressing ‘all of Humanity,’ but in order to ‘effectuate[s]
itself as power through this address’, it needed an ‘apparatus’ (disposi-
tive) that the Roman Empire later provided. This is something, by the
way, that could never have been imagined by Paul out of his own time
but which permanently remains as a precedent in our own.

Notes
1. ‘This peculiar relationship does not exclude but includes the fact that faith, as
a specific possibility of existence, is in its innermost core the mortal enemy
[todfeind] of the form of existence that is an essential part of philosophy and that
is factically ever-changing’ (Heidegger, 1998: 53).
2. ‘In this regard, it is to its element of fabulation [point de fable – although I
prefer to translate this phrase according to the Latin sense of fabula as a form
of ‘saying’] alone that Paul reduces the Christian narrative, with the strength
of one who knows that in holding fast to this point as real, one is unburdened
of all the imaginary that surrounds it’ (Badiou, 2003: 5).
3. ‘Paul declared that for gentile Christians now to wish to be ‘under the Law’
would not be a step forward but backward, equivalent to a return to Paganism
(Gal. 4:8–11). It would not be an act of obedience to God’s will, but of disobe-
dience toward the new order established by the Messiah’s coming and cruci-
fixion’ (Meeks, 1983: 176).
 Unprecedented Return of Saint Paul 131

4. Although, in the very same breath, Badiou will also admit that the popular
conceptions of ‘the ethics of difference’ do not fit with Levinas’s ‘actual
conception of things’ (Badiou, 1993: 20).

References
Badiou, A. (1993). Trans. by P. Hallward. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of
Evil. London: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2003). Trans. by R. Brassier. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1998). ‘Phenomenology and Theology.’ In W. McNeill (ed.)
Pathmarks 41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Husserl, E. (1970). Trans. by D. Carr. The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Levinas, E. (1978). Trans. by Alphonos Lingis. Existence and Existents. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff.
Levinas, E. (1972). Humanisme de l’autre homme. Paris: Fata Morgana.
Meeks, W.A. (1983). The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
7
More Proof, If Proof Were Needed:
Spectacles of Secular Insistence,
Multicultural Failure, and the
Contemporary Laundering of
Racism
Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley

Introduction

Innocence of Muslims is a trailer in search of its film, featuring actors in

search of their roles, directed by a propagandist sought by the FBI. It
did eventually find its audiences, active audiences that could, in many
instances, act on it without having seen it. If this kind of reaction is
usually held up as evidence of censorious ignorance, in this instance it
was merely adequate to the form, as the globally circulated trailer was
conceived with relatively firm expectations of its viewers and witnesses.
Posted on YouTube during July 2012 by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula – an
Egyptian-American Coptic Christian who used the pseudonym ‘Sam
Bacile’ – what has become known as the Innocence of Muslims exists for
the vast majority of its audience as a 14-minute pastiche, The Real Life
of Muhammad, a ‘trailer’ for an unverified full-length movie called The
Innocence of Bin Laden allegedly screened in Hollywood during June
2012.
The – now indignant and litigious – actors starring in the production
believed they were featuring in a low-budget film called Desert Warrior,
a swords-and-tattered-sandals affair following the early Egyptian adven-
tures of a character called ‘Master George’. In post-production Master
George became the Prophet Muhammad, who in this interpretation
noisily courts the charge of blasphemy by having sex with children,

132
 More Proof, If Proof Were Needed 133

talking to donkeys, and murdering random Christians (Bradshaw, 2012).

Following the concerted online promotion of an Arabic-dubbed version
in August 2012, the next month saw the gradual irruption of protests
and riots ‘in the Arab world’ and in Muslim-majority nations, and ulti-
mately mistaken assumptions that it triggered the lethal attack on the
US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, on 13 September.
Writing in The Guardian following the attack, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
(2012) noted that the protests owed much to ‘the organizational skills
of the Salafis ... wrong-footed by the Arab Spring.’ The strategic affinity
between provocative fire-starters and the enthusiastically inflamed
was consummated, as Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman
argue, in ‘a targeted attack designed to exploit the predispositions
of our media systems’ (MacKinnon and Zuckerman, 2012: 17). The
desire to intervene in the revolutionary conditions in Egypt certainly
informed Nakoula’s actions, and that of the blogger Morris Sadek –
founder of the small National American Coptic Assembly – who was
influential in circulating the Arabic version subsequently presented
by Sheikh Khaled Abdullah on the Egyptian satellite channel al Nas
(and remediated as a ‘US-sponsored production’). This strategy was
broadly acknowledged in initial, critical discussions that focused on
the paucity of censorial responses to the politics of digital provoca-
tion. For MacKinnon and Zuckerman, the producers of the video are
‘essentially trolls’, seeking to:

... Provide Middle Eastern Muslims with evidence that Americans

misunderstand and disrespect Islam so badly that hundreds of people
are willing to get together and make a film insulting the Prophet. The
ensuing protests play to the American commercial media’s focus on
the sudden and violent reactions, at the expense of processes that may
be more important but are hard to portray visually: the authoring of
a Libyan constitution, peaceful elections in Egypt. (MacKinnon and
Zuckerman, 2012: 18–19)

For their imagined ‘Western viewer’, at least, the provocative intent of

the video is obvious, and the answer to this provocation, according to
Meredith Tax, is not ‘censorship’ of the video by Google and YouTube
but rational restraint; ‘The film was designed to insult, but nobody
forces people to go crazy when their religion is insulted’ (Tax, 2012).
However, this is to mis-recognize the preferred audiences for the video,
and to assume that the question of free expression transcends the
structure of provocation. In early September, the Pro Deutschland
134 Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley

Citizen’s Movement announced plans to hold a screening of the

video in Berlin, weeks after they had demonstrated at several Berlin
mosques brandishing copies of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad
cartoons. Responding to criticisms that they sought to ‘recklessly pour
oil on the fire’, the movement’s leader, Manfred Rouhs, argued that
‘for us, it’s a question of art and freedom of expression’ (Dowling,
2012). While the appropriative defence of liberal principles by actors
from determinedly anti-liberal traditions has limited public cred-
ibility, the French magazine Charlie Hebdo pursued Rouh’s question
towards a familiar set of answers by publishing a series of cartoons of
Muhammad, including images of the ‘Prophet naked’. According to
Editor-in-Chief Gérard Biard, the publication of the cartoons was to
satirize ‘the silly film’, and because

The decision to publish the images was in keeping with France’s proud
history of secularism. There is only one reason [for the cartoons] – it
was the news of the week. We have the silly movie, the silly film, about
the Prophet Muhammad and we have the burning of the American
embassy in Libya. We are a satirical, political magazine, we publish
in France which is a laïc [secular] nation and ... we are against all reli-
gions. The cartoons’ publication is not in itself a violence-provoking
act. (Khazan, 2012)

But, what kind of act is it? In the networked ‘comment cultures’ (Lovink,
2011) activated by the act of publication, it was widely interpreted as
proposing normative questions of the limits of freedom of expression
and, concomitantly, the ‘right to offend’ in defence of the secular. It is
through this second-order shift that the full structure of provocation is
realized. John Durham Peters (2006, 2009) argues that debates about
freedom of speech are recursive; the substantive issue in question is
frequently subsumed to abstract(ed) debates about the remit and status
of the first principles invoked. This recursivity is frequently structured
around a ‘threefold cast of characters’ initiated by the protagonist who
breaks a taboo, who is subsequently defended – in principle if not moti-
vation – by champions of the open society, who come to regard the
subjects that have ‘taken offence’ as ‘ ... deficient in comparison with the
evident open-mindedness of those who tolerate transgression’ (Peters,
2009: 276). ‘Nobody forces people to go crazy when their religion is
insulted’; if the first-order issue is that of the mediated provocation, it
is the second-order issue of the deficiency of the insulted that – at least
since the Danish Cartoon affair – garners most attention, and serves to
 More Proof, If Proof Were Needed 135

enact dramas of secular resistance to the ‘non-European’ responses of

European Muslims.
This recurrent triangulation is of structural centrality to the circula-
tion of Innocence of Muslims, the latest in a referential chain of intensive,
often globally mediated events that invite the postsecular publics that
are the subject of this book to align themselves in familiar patterns on
a well-marked terrain. The strategy of provoking ‘the offended’ seeks a
vision of an achieved state of publicness threatened by this surplus of
emotional investment; the state of being secular that is widely accepted
as ‘common sense’ in Western nation-states (Jakobsen and Pellegrini,
2008). If secularization theses, as Charles Taylor (2007) argues, circulate
as ‘subtraction stories’, these mediated events seek to foreground and
foreclose on the uninvited addition, an irruptive backwardness that is
always, in these set pieces, Muslim. ‘There is no right not to be offended’;
each ‘transgressive’ communicative act thus also claims the status of
moral advance, holding and demarcating the civilizational line, but also
offering the promise of an unsentimental education to the backward, an
opportunity for them to embrace, however painfully, progress.
For this reason, the politically orchestrated, diffused free speech events
of the last years have become central generators of public discourse on
the postsecular, and critical to the ‘reduction of the postsecular condition
to the “Muslim issue”’ (Braidotti, 2008). The political motility of these
events, and the ways in which they seek to engage postsecular publics,
are discussed in this chapter. Anatomizing these public spectacles, we
argue, is central to addressing the central point made by Jakobsen and
Pellegrini, who, in arguing for the need to interrupt the binary rhetoric
of progressive secular and backward religiosity, contend that ‘ ... chal-
lenging the ways in which the secularization narrative is told are thus
more than academic exercises in terminological precision. The ways in
which the terms secularism and religion frame contemporary debates
mean that possibilities for moving out of these impasses are obscured’
(Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008).
Moving out of this framing impasse involves recognizing that the
reduction of the postsecular debate to the ‘Muslim issue’ depends on
the occlusion of the politics of race in putatively post-racial polities. We
agree with Rosi Braidotti that ‘this reduction of the postsecular condi-
tion to the “Muslim issue”, in the context of a war on terror that results
in the militarization of the social space, means that any unreflective
brand of normative secularism runs the risk of complicity with anti-Islam
racism and xenophobia’ (Braidotti, 2008). However we would go beyond
‘complicity’ to insist that countering this reductive understanding of the
136 Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley

postsecular requires a reckoning with a mode of racialization invested in

constructing and legitimizing a categorical difference between race and
religion.
The embedding of the secular in a narrative of modern achievement
imperilled by religious backwardness maps onto this, and provides lines
of racial ordering despite the purported move beyond into post-racial
times. In combining an insistence on racialization within post-racial poli-
ties with an analysis of how postsecular publics are invited to rehearse
familiar, recursive scripts, we seek to illustrate the multiple forms of
aversion directed at those held to problematically repopulate the space
of subtraction. The ‘secular’, projected and territorialized as a property
of European public space, provides a terrain for the post-racial sorting
and ordering into what we have termed ‘good’ versus ‘bad diversity’
(Lentin and Titley, 2011: 161–192). Transcending the binary of secular/
religion, we argue, depends on recognizing that this ordering produces
racialized divisions in that race acts not only to determine acceptability,
visibility, and citizenship but also to fix those deemed unacceptable, as
less-than citizens, and as immutable subjects, unwilling and incapable
of change.
To show this, the chapter first discusses the post-racial idea and its
relevance for an understanding of postsecularism in an era characterized
by the opposition to multiculturalism, a mythical return to ‘national
values’, and the barely veiled assimilatory logic of the insistence on
‘integration’ in Europe, and increasingly Canada and Australia. If we
accept, as Barnor Hesse (2011) argues, that, rather than being a recent
political development of the post-Obama era, the idea that the West is
post-race is foundational to modern racism, we can better understand
how some arguments against religiosity can counter claims of racism
while remaining anchored in raciological logics (Gilroy, 2002). Secondly,
we uncover the ways in which the backlash against multiculturalism is
intrinsically post-racial in that it is predicated on a separation from race
and culture – and by extension religion – which establishes it as non- or
anti-racist.
Lastly, we examine the ways in which spectacles of secular insist-
ence, and their amplification and translation across times and spaces
of communication, act to cement the post-racial formations that the
opposition of secularism/Islam rely upon. A narrow-gauge focus on
the putative threats posed by recalcitrant ‘migrant’ minorities to secu-
larism risks extending the ‘reverse racism’ claims of backlash politics
(Hewitt, 2012) by locating the primary source of racism among the
‘illiberal minorities’ permitted to challenge the settled ways of secular
 More Proof, If Proof Were Needed 137

life in postcolonial Europe. Through such spectacles, the post-racial

elision of power relations between Western hosts and perennial guests
is deepened.

Postracial common sense

The motto of the Stop the Islamization of Europe (SIOE) movement is

‘Racism is the lowest form of stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height
of common sense’. Such a construction hints at an awareness of how the
trace of race is always immanent in its disavowal, yet it also summarizes
the legitimation of a new hierarchy of belonging, hiding in plain sight.
‘The whole apparatus of race’, as Peter Wade argues, ‘has always been
as much about culture as it has about nature, shifting between these
two domains’ (Wade, 2010: 45). Yet, as the considerable literature on
so-called culturalist or ‘new’ racism indicates, this ‘differentialist’ racism
involves a disavowal of race as tied to quasi-scientific categorization
and phenotypical difference, while instead pressing cultural and reli-
gious signs into service as racial signifiers (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991;
Taguieff, 1989; Stolcke, 1995). A particular form of rationalist critique
of religion furthers this; if religious faith is regarded as an intellectual
commitment that can be rescinded, how can criticism of religion be
racist when racism is of the body and of the past?
The SIOE slogan signals the centrality of post-racial certainty as an
organizing principle of a new racial formation. However, it is impor-
tant to recognize that this has always been a feature of the elucidation
of modern racisms, and establishing this helps understand why it is
articulated so emphatically in contemporary debates. In constructing
an argument on ‘The Postracial Horizon’, Barnor Hesse proposes that
the idea that racism has been substantively resolved is made possible
only by a narrow understanding of racism ‘as a concept with a partic-
ular history of emergence and a particular logic of indicting race’
(Hesse, 2011: 157). Discussing the early European anti-racist writing
of the interwar years, in particular Huxley and Haddon’s (1935) We
Europeans, Hesse notes that while the authors were concerned with the
way in which the pseudo-biology of racism was polluting science with
illiberal (Nazi) ideology (Hesse, 2011: 158), it nevertheless takes for
granted the ‘naturalization of the colonial or racially segregated world’
(Hesse, 2011). That is, the colonial rule by Europeans of a majority
of the world’s population, through oppressive structures – and subju-
gating and exploitative arrangements – was understood as separate to
the problem of racism.
138 Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley

What Hesse is claiming, therefore, is that far from being a new

phenomenon, often associated with the twenty-first century and, more
particularly, with the election of Barack Obama, racism has always
been post-racial. The silence about race (Lentin, 2004) has always been
written into racism. Furthermore, the post-racial was given voice in part
by those who sought to undo racism. By foreclosing on the colonial as
what must ‘remain unspeakable’ in relation to race (Hesse, 2011: 158),
anti-racists such as Huxley, but more importantly, Western nation-states
after the dismantling of fascist regimes in Europe and racial segregation
in southern US states, repeatedly reproduced racial formations (Omi and
Winant, 1994). This narrative of the progressive expunging of racism
allowed for the contours of state anti-racism to be defined according
to a view of racism that saw it as inherently pathological, and thus
implicitly in contravention of Western values. Anti-racist discourses that
problematized this by insisting on the racial nature of colonial rule and
the persistence of colonial logics in postcolonial arrangements – espe-
cially in countries with large numbers of postcolonial immigrants, or in
settler colonial societies – could thus be positioned as in opposition to
this dominant mode of anti-racism. The French politologue Pierre-André
Taguieff, for example, drew a line between anti-racism as a universalist
cause, and the ‘communitarian’ third-worldism of Frantz Fanon and
those who insisted on a critique of colonial arrangements and their
enduring significance.

The postracial crisis of multiculturalism

The dominant association of post-racialism with the context of post-

civil rights racial politics in the US contrasts with a general disre-
gard for the concept in discussions of Europe. However, by adopting
the approach established by Hesse, we can see that its fundamental
dialogic importance to racism means that it has wider purchase. The
European variant of post-racialism – echoed in Canada and Australia –
is predominantly articulated through the notion that multicultur-
alism, imagined as a coherent if not totalizing social experiment, has
been, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel put it in 2011, an ‘utter
failure’.
As we argued in The Crises of Multiculturalism (2011), the blanket denun-
ciation of multiculturalism by political leaders and public commenta-
tors has become something of a political orthodoxy in the post-9/11
era. Contrary to these imagined projects of experimental failure, there
is no history of coherent multicultural policy in any European country.
 More Proof, If Proof Were Needed 139

Multicultural policies rarely amounted to what Goldberg (2009) terms

‘prescriptive multiculturalism’ in any European context, but rather to a
patchwork of initiatives that frequently depended on a reified, cultur-
alist view of ‘minority ethnic communities’ – a view that still prevails in
discourses of multicultural backlash.
Rather, as Stuart Hall has noted, multiculturalism is a ‘maddeningly
spongy and imprecise discursive field’, and it is precisely this capacious-
ness that has allowed multiculturalism to become a central signifier of
discontent and aversion in diverse, postcolonial migration societies.
Multiculturalism, therefore, can be approached analytically as a mobi-
lizing metaphor and discursive assemblage that facilitates and orders
debate on questions of race, legitimacy, and belonging in societies that
are now experienced through what Velayutham and Wise (2009) call
‘everyday multiculturalism’.
The rhetoric of multicultural crisis is avowedly post-racial; it is predi-
cated upon a silencing of the racial, and on a recognition that the official
universal commitment to anti-racism involves no radical implications.
Thus those who rally against an amorphous multiculturalism frequently
do so in the name of ‘anti-racism’. Ben Pitcher (2009) illustrates this
when, in his analysis of the 2005 British general election campaign,
he recalls the Conservative slogan ‘Are You Thinking What We Are
Thinking?’ – the subtext beneath a large faux handwritten billboard that
reads, ‘It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration.’ As Pitcher argues,
this argument can proceed only once its non-racist intention has been
spelled out:

The public disavowal of racism points to the success of what might

be termed a language war over racial reference. As with the impact
of feminism on public debate, any direct approach to the question
of race must be channelled through a public discourse that explic-
itly signals the illegitimacy of racist beliefs and practices. (Pitcher,
2009)

The non-racism of much anti-multiculturalist discourse is achieved by

reinforcing the separation made between race and culture. Reflecting
the identification made in the 1980s and 1990s of a new, culturalist or
differentialist racism (Barker, 1981; Taguieff, 1991; Stolcke, 1995), the
contemporary emphasis on ‘problematic’ cultures is carefully predicated
on a rejection of racism, where race is reduced to the pseudo-science
of the differences of ‘colour, hair and bone’ (Du Bois, 1897). Thus, for
example, Christopher Caldwell, in his widely publicized book Reflections
140 Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley

on the Revolution In Europe: Can Europe Be the Same with Different People In
It? (2009) is careful to deflect the charge of racism in relation to Spanish
policies preferring immigration from Latin America, instead turning to
religion as a natural basis for exclusion:

[This policy is] not racist. Spain is less concerned that its immigrants
be white than they have similarities of worldview with the people
already established there, starting with knowing what the inside of a
church looks like. (Caldwell, 2009: 52)

Of course, this simplistic divide between race and culture denies the
fact that both biological and cultural reasons – and most often a combi-
nation – have always served as justifications for racist dispossession
(Young, 2005). Whether a person is attacked on the grounds of biology
or culture may be largely irrelevant to the experience of ‘discrimination
and insult’ (Du Bois, 1940). However, as Hesse explains, because race
had become so intertwined with a notion of racism shaped by asso-
ciations with European Nazism and the North American colour line,
this division can be readily sustained. In fact, the wholesale opposition
of race to culture was already in place, allowing recent backlashes to
multiculturalism to be mapped onto it, thus lending weight to their
non-racism.
The ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ is post-racial, therefore, in that, while
publicly denouncing racism, it proceeds to rehearse the dynamics of
race as a technology of power and hierarchy. The assault on multicultur-
alism frequently depends on fixing problematic populations as cultur-
ally immutable and determined, a fixity which functionally reproduces
the absoluteness of racial categorization while holding out the promise
of integration, if only they (could) change. Yet, it is this putative refusal
to change that informs a related dimension of the post-racial – the
frequent invocation of ‘reverse racism’ that accompanies much of this
discourse. In this sense, the opposition to a strategically inflated multi-
culturalism mirrors right-of-centre US post-racialism more directly.
The texture of this ‘racism’ is particularly revealing if juxtaposed with
Hesse’s argument about the foundational silence about race. If racism,
as Hesse argues, was a European discussion of a European problem, and
one which progressed in denial of the colonial context in which it was
nevertheless being theorized, it is unsurprising that ‘anti-white racism’
has emerged as a non-ironic term today. In the context of the failure
of experimental and excessively generous multicultural experiments,
racism can be held to ‘cut both ways’ and directed by non-whites at those
 More Proof, If Proof Were Needed 141

hosts who strove to accommodate them. In some contexts, France, in

particular, this ‘reverse racism’ has been given the unequivocal name of
‘anti-white racism’. The French conservative, Jean-François Copé, who
triggered a debate on ‘anti-white racism’ in France during his campaign
for the leadership of Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party in 2012, writes,

I know I am breaking a taboo by using the term ‘anti-white racism’

but I do it on purpose, because it is the truth being experienced by
some of our fellow citizens and remaining silent only serves to aggra-
vate their trauma. (Copé, 2012)1

The ‘trauma’ elucidated by Copé includes being called ‘Gaullois’ by

those banlieusards who now oppose white people for simply having ‘a
different religion, a different skin colour, or a different ethnic origin’
(Copé, 2012). Copé’s rhetorical commitments to the need for greater
‘diversity’ in media and politics – the official anti-racist position – can
without a problem sit alongside his proclamation of anti-white racism.
Post-racial anti-multiculturalism is, therefore, constructed through a
presentation of racism as universal – something unfortunately experi-
enced by everyone, depending on circumstance. In a suburb where there
is a large presence of North Africans, for example, it is to be expected,
following Copé’s logic, that whites will be the victims of racist trauma.
Thus anti-racism can be extended to include those who would defend an
embattled white majority from attack by those still constituted as immi-
grants. In an aligned example, Arun Kundnani’s study of the English
Defence League, (EDL) shows that their defence of a ‘way of life’ against
Muslim ‘extremism’ allows them to position themselves as post-racial
freedom fighters – even appropriating the anti-racist slogan ‘Black and
White, Unite and Fight’ (Kundnani, 2012).
These reconfigurations of the terrain of racism, always intrinsic and
necessary for racial formation, are politically dissociated from the civili-
zational oppositions constructed between secularism and minority reli-
gious identities. Yet, the purported ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ centres
Islam and the presence of Muslims as definitive of the problem for
Europe. The presence of Islam in Europe recalls the failure of coloni-
alism to completely conquer racial, cultural, or religious difference. The
disciplinary appeal to the purported universality of the secular follows
a similar logic to racism’s quest to construct an ideal of universal man
(sic) as a standard against which to assess all non-moderns (Balibar,
1994). Yet, the foundational postness of race obscures this from view,
thus cleansing Islamophobia of the taint of racism.
142 Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley

Fixing the fixed notion: spectacles of secular insistence

For this reason, we contend that a fixed notion of the secular is bound
up in processes of racialization; it fixes the modern secular individual
as against backwards religious people and collectivities. If racism,
as Les Back argues, is a ‘scavenger ideology’, the alacrity with which
anti-Muslim networks have appropriated the defence of the secular
on the post-multicultural ideological terrain is hardly surprising. In a
survey of the transnational anti-Muslim ideoscape, Liz Fekete (2012)
describes an overlapping series of conspiracy theories, from ‘Internet-
focused counter-jihadist activists at one end and neoconservative and
cultural conservative columnists, commentators and politicians at the
other’ (Fekete, 2012: 30). While broadly unified by visions of creeping
Islamification facilitated by the elite weakness of relativist multicultur-
alism, Fekete notes that a key point of differentiation is between those
who disseminate deliberate conspiracy theories, and those who locate
the irruption of Muslim excess in the naïve elitism and political paral-
ysis of the ‘liberal left’. Understood not only as a religion but also as a
totalitarian political and cultural system, any fragment of evidence of
Islamic backwardness is given up as further proof of the global nature of
this totalizing drive and integral threat.
Sharing Geert Wilders’s conviction that Islam is a ‘cult’, Muslims are
constructed as theological automatons. Thus, over and above associa-
tion with terrorism, their very presence is held to signify a ‘new stage
in an old war’; any cultural manifestation of presence, from mina-
rets to headscarves, can be cast as evidence of ideological, cultural,
religious, and even demographic conflict. The implacable differen-
tialism of ‘new racism’ (Barker, 1981) is here extended through an
idealist focus on the problem of religion. The subject can theoreti-
cally repudiate religion. However, as Fekete points out, ‘those who
see an Islamic conspiracy ... suggest that Muslims who do not signal
their Muslimness ... are merely posing as modern, progressive and
westernized. They are in fact camouflaged, and this makes them the
more dangerous’ (Fekete, 2012: 35). Echoing the anti-Semitic fear of
the assimilated Jew (Arendt, 1966), it illustrates how ‘racial histori-
cism’ shades into and depends on the ‘naturalist racism’ it strategically
denies – ‘cultural difference’, in this frame, is so set and irremediable as
to make no meaningful difference (see Goldberg, 1993).
Freedom of speech, gender equality, and sexual freedom provide a trans-
parently strategic vocabulary for marking out the irreducible problem
of the Muslim in Europe, and this marking out posits a civilizational
 More Proof, If Proof Were Needed 143

hierarchy that has no need to appeal to pathologized racism. While the

appropriation of these discourses by conventionally anti-immigrant and
right-wing groups is widely recognized, what has been termed ‘muscular
liberalism’ has staked out its claims on the same post-multicultural
terrain that, we argue, is generative of racism, postrace. Adam Tebble
(2006) has traced a shift towards what he terms ‘identity liberalism’,
defined in explicit opposition to relativist multiculturalism, and advo-
cating national cultures of shared values, compulsory forms of immi-
grant assimilation, and a duty of the state to protect liberal culture, up
to and including the exclusion of non-liberal forms of life in defence of
democracy.
Identity liberalism’s claim to distinctiveness is not based on a singular
national ethnos threatened by incompatible cultures but instead on a
vision of the defence of liberal principles and ways of life – the national
identity of liberal polities – against illiberal forces, and against the threat
of regressive cultures to both the liberal polity and the individual rights
of minorities. Thus, for identity liberals, ‘multiculturalism as a response
to diversity does not represent the equalization of cultural expression
but rather the death of the very culture that permitted multiculturalism
in the first place’ (Tebble, 2006: 481). Identity liberalism depends on
the reductive culturalism discussed earlier, for as Anne Philips notes,
‘ ... in the debates around multiculturalism, to allow for the relevance of
culture without making culture a determinant of action’ is held to lapse
into a hapless relativism (Philips, 2007: 130–131; italics in original).
This clarifies how identity liberalism is not an ontological rejection
of multiculturalism, but a re-composition of its foundational assump-
tions – the problem is not culture but cultural excess of the wrong kind.
Tebble’s formulation is persuasive as it captures the rise of a liberal iden-
tity politics but one based on a narrative of past failures: identity politics
is something they do, and that was indulged to dangerous excess. These
illiberal others are racialized not, as with right-wing Islamophobia, on
the basis of the insurmountability of cultural difference but because
of their perceived refusal to surmount it. Race, Angela Mitropolous
argues, now ‘marks the boundary of that which is considered not to be
amenable to will; that which lies beyond or without will, that which is
deemed to be neither responsive to liberalism’s “good will” nor capable
of assuming its inclination’ (Mitropolous, 2008: 1). Identity liber-
alism, then, provides a transnationalist modality that inscribes ‘already
achieved’ freedoms as the core values of the enlightened nation, and
Europe, and the secular, as a space of freedom achieved, cannot be
beholden to bad will. It is here that the refrain that ‘religion can never
144 Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley

mean race’ is at its most potent. To insist, in this political conjuncture,

on religious, and specifically Muslim, presence in secular space is to
reject liberalism’s ‘good will’, which can only be done in ‘bad faith’, or
on account of the ‘deficiency’ noted by John Durham Peters (2009). Jeff
Sparrow makes a similar point in analysing the ‘weaponization’ of the
so-called New Atheism post-9/11:

If religion is an intellectual doctrine and nothing more than that, the

persistence with which so many cling to God faith becomes expli-
cable only in terms of their congenital inability to reason. Or to put
it another way, if religion is purely and simply a fairy tale, then ipso
facto those who cling to it are little better than children. (Sparrow,
2012)

European postracialism is primarily articulated not through a rejection

of cultural difference but of cultural excess. It is announced through
an embrace of diversity, where diversity is understood as that which
racism rejects. But where there is diversity – tolerated, accepted and
celebrated – there is also that which is not diversity, or bad diversity. The
terrain of racism under neoliberal and securitarian logics foregrounds
the subject who is autonomous and non-conflictual, who constitutes
good diversity to be cultivated. However ‘bad diversity’, like the head-
scarf, for example – the expression of the problem of wrong freedom or
bad choice – has come to embody the opposition to identitarian liber-
alism. This ‘piece of cloth’ is emblematic of the risky, excessive commu-
nitarianism of the failed, multiculturalist past. Naming, managing, and
disciplining ‘bad diversity’ is thus central to the postracial articulation
of the common, transcendent values that mark ‘us’ out as different.
Where diversity is acknowledged as a good, current ‘race relations’
paradigms aim to govern that which is surplus, seeking ‘to avoid postra-
cial disorder by managing the impact of “dangerous ethnic emotions”’
(Kyriakides and Torres, 2012). In the spectacle of secular insistence, any
reaction to provocation which does not replicate the idealized rational
restraint invoked by Meredith Tax (2012) risks being cast as evidence
of precisely this kind of dangerous ethnic emotion, bad diversity,
unamenable to good will, out of place in the public sphere. As this brief
summary of political trajectories suggests, the racialization of Muslims
in and through the fixity of the secular is predicated on disciplining the
excess and the surplus, that which refuses the new ‘integration line’ of
the post-multicultural moment. Identifying these ideological formations
does not in and of itself explain their public formation. It is here that a
 More Proof, If Proof Were Needed 145

consideration of spectacles of secular insistence is useful, as they seek to

animate the problem of bad diversity in a transnational media space by
inviting active audiences to rehearse principled, postracial exclusions.
The general intent of the circulation of Innocence of Muslims (IoM) was
to provoke violent reactions to blasphemous provocation, but also to
stir echoes, to reprise antecedent events that foregrounded the Muslim
problem through recursive debates on freedom of speech, the scope of
the secular, and in defence of the modern.
According to Cindy Lee Garcia, a Californian actress who played a
IoM character who gives her daughter in marriage, ‘Sam Bacile’ wanted
her daughter to look as if she was seven years old, rather than ten, to
heighten the outrage when ‘Master George’ had sex with her. This refine-
ment was apparently rejected on the film set, but ‘Is your Muhammad
a child molester?’ is the altered line that Garcia’s character eventu-
ally utters. The discourse of child molestation focuses on Aisha, the
third, and youngest, of Muhammad’s wives, and has become a staple
dimension of right-wing provocation. As the case of Lars Hedegaard of
the Danish Free Press Society – who been prosecuted in Denmark for
drawing on this trope to assert that ‘Girls in Muslim families are raped
by their uncles, their cousins or their fathers’ – indicates, this fixation
seeks to further suture gender politics to Islamophobic justification, but
not only. The accusation of paedophilia seeks to posit a taboo that must
be broken, and thus broken, must be defended in principle as a ques-
tion of free speech and as an instructive, secular assault on the charge
of blasphemy.
The template for spectacles of insistence such as that created by the
diffusion of IoM is the global currency of the Jyllands-Posten cartoon
‘crisis’ of 2005–2006. Given the polysemy of the cartoon form, and the
decontextualization and reframing of the cartoons in bewildering syntag-
matic chains across time and space (see Klausen, 2009), no dominant
framework can be applied to their knotted interpretations. However, as
Peter Hervik argues, the ‘collective memory’ of the affair in Denmark is
as an assault on the Danish expression of the core Western value of free
expression, rather than as an event generated as an explicit contribution
to ‘culture war’ in an intensely nationalist context, globalized by the
actions of both Danish imams and the ideologues associated with the
paper:

The debate in Danish news is marred by the repeated assertion that

‘freedom of speech is a Danish freedom’ and foreign events such as
demonstrations ... are not examples of freedom of expression. The
146 Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley

moral anger of some Danes is tremendous when it comes to the

foreign reactions, but when it comes to the cartoon publications, the
right to publish is the first thing evoked. Hence the debate suggests
that the free speech response is not much more than a reflection
of the powerful, hegemonic dichotomization of a positive ‘us’ and a
negative ‘them’ in Danish society. (Hervik, 2009: 70)

Similarly, Ferruh Yilmaz illustrates how the ‘timeless ontological catego-

ries’ of Muslims and the West were naturalized through the globalized
recursive focus on freedom of speech and the question of blasphemy
and the normative demand that journalists adopt some form of prin-
cipled position on the scope of free expression. Reproducing these
timeless categories, Yilmaz argues, effects a ‘hegemonic displacement’
by eliding the political conditions in Denmark and by collapsing the
dynamic globalization of an event into the static civilizational terms
preferred by its protagonists:

To bring back politics to the center of the discourse, we need to ask

much simpler questions: who initiates these crises around Muslims
and Islam? What are their politics, and what are the socio-political
implications of these crises? A discussion of such questions will reveal
that there are certain political and ideological sources that push
certain issues onto the agenda and force us to be drawn into prin-
cipled discussions about those issues rather than the politics of the
debate. (Yilmaz, 2011)

The productive potential of this abstraction explains why the cartoons

remain such a potent signifier, from their hypertextual rehearsal in
Fitna, Geert Wilders’s freedom-of-speech roadshow, to the framing of
the prohibition of campaign posters in Lausanne during the minaret
construction referendum in Switzerland in 2009 as the latest instalment
in multiculturalism’s betrayal of secularism and free expression (see
Titley, 2012: 52–53). Research on the conduct of ‘integration debates’
in different Western European sites points to how international events
frame domestic discussions, particularly ‘terrorist events abroad and
fears that “imported” Islamic fundamentalist and “illiberal, intolerant”
movements will take root in “modern western” Europe, increasingly
frame the domestic news in reporting of issues related to the Muslim
community’ (Fekete, 2009: 23).
Spectacles of insistence go to work because the networked and instan-
taneous dynamics of mediation draw on heavily culturalized images and
indexicalities, translating headline issues from context to context. This
 More Proof, If Proof Were Needed 147

ensures that disparate Muslim populations must always negotiate the

public positioning of their ‘community’ in relation to evidence of the
Muslim ‘issue’ or ‘problem’ from elsewhere. Yasmin Ibrahim (2007) has
argued that the post-9/11 period has involved the production of a ‘refer-
ential archive’ of associations and images that ‘ ... creates an intertextu-
ality which constantly weaves events as new memories crafting a new
temporality to gauge and locate Islam’ (Ibrahim, 2007: 49), a process she
terms disorientalism:

Since 9/11 the narrative of Islam has put the focus on Muslim commu-
nities in the West. Unlike the Islamic revolution in Iran in the late
1970s and 1980s, this ‘reimagining’ of Islam, narrated as posing a
clear and present danger to civilisation, has placed Muslim commu-
nities in the West under relentless scrutiny. The Muslim intellectual
debates and responses emanating from the communities are often
seen as being externalized from the conditions of modernity or its
incumbent reflexivity. The constant need to respond to events associ-
ated with Islam renders immense pressure on these communities to
negotiate the sustained moral and social stigmatization in narrating
Islam. (Ibrahim, 2007: 48)

In other words, they are asked to become and to perform as referents

for the ‘timeless ontological categories’ of Muslims and the West, in the
West, ensuring that the second-order question of their reactions, and
their deficiencies, remains at the heart of principled debates about ‘our’
guiding values.

Conclusion

In his essay on the ‘weaponization’ of atheism, Jeff Sparrow notes that

‘Anti-Muslim writers commonly declare that Islam needs its own refor-
mation. But that’s a charge that should really be levelled at atheism’
(Sparrow, 2012). Regardless of the specific charge, Sparrow is correct that
a movement that has settled into ‘a crude nineteenth-century positivism’
requires a resurgence of political antagonism, opening a critical space
capable of untangling ‘new’ atheism’s investments in and affinities with
neo-imperial rationality. In this chapter, we are arguing for a similar
disruption of the terms of the opposition between progressive secularism
and backward religiosity by insisting on the racializing dividend of this
opposition in contemporary European societies, a dividend deepened
and extended by the postracial certainty upon which the disavowal of
multiculturalism, as the central axis of raceless racism, relies.
148 Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley

The centrality of race to modern political formations is scarcely

acknowledged, and race is broadly neglected in discussions of secularism
and modernity (see Taylor, 2007). This neglect must be addressed if, as
we have argued, hollowing out the ‘race’ in racism requires its replace-
ment with other malleable domains of differentiation and hierarchy,
with religion being primary. Just as there is nothing novel, bar updated
referents, about culturalist attitudes to problematic difference, so, too, the
framing of particular world views, practices, and identities as incompat-
ible with Western ideas and ideals is foundational to raciological thinking.
The ‘scavenger-like’ adaptability of racism is neglected in analyses that
decentre race as analytically critical to understanding how debates on the
boundaries of the secular play out politically in contemporary Europe.
The significance of understanding this is underlined in a recent article by
the spokesperson of the French decolonial organization, the Mouvement
des indigènes de la République, Houria Bouteldja. She reflects on her involve-
ment in a debate on gay marriage during a television chat show:

I will tell you straight up, this debate doesn’t concern me. It doesn’t
concern me because my words are particular and they are situated. A
certain number of positions are expressed on this set and in France
when this issue is discussed: you’re either on the right or on the left,
progressive or reactionary. I don’t fit within that frame at all. I am
outside of all of that because my words are situated somewhere else
politically. I am situated in the history of postcolonial immigration
and in the working-class neighbourhoods.

Bouteldja’s point is assuredly not – as the Islamophobic frame would

assume – that those of immigrant backgrounds, many of them Muslim,
are neither homosexual themselves or favourable to gay equality. Rather,
it is ‘not a priority issue’ for her as a political spokesperson because ‘people
are dealing with things that are more important and urgent’, yet the
condition of her entry to mainstream debate is to occupy preordained
roles as a Muslim. But furthermore, she claims that a decolonial position
cannot advocate for a universalist framing of the struggle for gay rights
because to do so would erase both the complicity of that struggle with
racializing and neocolonialist politics today (see Long, 2007), and the role
played by colonialism in erasing ‘the history of sexual practices in Islamic
lands, including homo-eroticism’. The homophobia existent in France’s
‘immigrant neighbourhoods’ is not a function of Islam but a result of the
fact that ‘imperialism in all its forms turns the indigène into a savage.’ For
Bouteldja, individual acts of homophobic aggression should neither be
excused nor denied, but like Yilmaz, she is arguing against the constant
 More Proof, If Proof Were Needed 149

displacement onto headline civilizational terms, the recursive move that

evacuates the situated and the political. That is, it is fruitless to attempt
to explain contemporary social conflicts over gender and sexuality, or
indeed class, labour, or political representation, as if they were wholly
unconnected to the history of how what Hesse terms ‘raceocracy’ has
served to create not only material but ideational hierarchies that continue
to divide (Burtenshaw, 2013). If the ‘postsecular’ has been reduced to the
‘Muslim issue’, securing a wider terrain for considerations of postsecular
life and subjectivities requires not just calling for a more open and inclu-
sive public terrain but understanding the work of racialization in effecting
and extending this stubborn reduction. As a contribution to this, we argue
not only for a focus on the postracial, but also for taking seriously those
events and spectacles that invite postsecular publics to take principled
positions in relation to an abstract ‘secular’, projected and territorialized
as an exclusive property of European public space.

Note
1. See Copé (2012); translation authors’ own.

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8
Remediating Religion as
Everyday Practice: Postsecularism,
Postcolonialism, and Digital
Culture
Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

Introduction: postsecular and postcolonial engagements

This essay focuses on instances of religion in everyday online prac-

tices as expressed by migrant youth (i.e., Moroccan-Dutch youth in
the Netherlands). We explore, in particular, how the engagement with
digital practices, such as participation in social network sites like Hyves
and Facebook and online discussion forums such as www.Marokko.nl,
offer specific instances of the postsecular condition that deserve further
scrutiny. The digital realm offers, in fact, medium-specific modalities for
creating counter-publics – locations of appropriation and contestation
of the dictums imposed by so-called secular society on migrant groups
and their faiths and beliefs – but also an arena for alternative affective
networks, through which religion is embedded and incorporated in
everyday personal needs.
In order to do so, we take into account how the reawakened interest
in the role of religion, or spirituality, in society at large has taken a radi-
calized turn after the events of 9/11, creating a racialization of religion
(Balibar, 1991) which often leads to singling out Muslim groups as outside
of the frame of modernity. In response to this, migrant groups construct
strategies and tactics to react and subvert these wider phenomena from
safe/intimate digital spaces. For this purpose, an exploration of the
entanglement of the ‘postsecular’ with the ‘postcolonial’ is timely as the
two terms share a prefix which contests both the secular and the colo-
nial as common requisites for the condition of modernity.1

152
 Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice 153

Despite this connection, postcolonial critique has been reluctant to

engage with the recent postsecular turn, based possibly on Said’s heritage
of secular humanism, which has been hugely influential for postcolo-
nial studies. In his introduction to The World, the Text and the Critic,
Said explains his notion of ‘Secular Criticism’ (Said, 1983) as inherently
linked to his notion of humanism. In the conclusion to the same book,
within the chapter titled ‘Religious Criticism’, he positions the return of
religion as a result of ‘exhaustion, consolation, disappointment’ among
intellectuals (Said, 1983: 291). In his world view, Said does not take per se
religion as his target, nor attempts to bypass religion as irrelevant within
postcolonial societies. He rather calls for a challenge to fundamentalist
dogmas in all societies and cultures. Criticism can be secular only if it
takes nothing as sacred, and submits to no certainties. As Robbins writes,
‘this credo reinstates in the vocabulary of the sacred and the secular
what Said elsewhere put into a geographical figure: the sacred is being at
home, the secular is being in exile’ (Robbins, 2012,: 118–119).
Elaborating on Robbins’s understanding of Said’s secularism Aamir
Mufti argues that Said most often opposes the term secular not to reli-
gion per se but to nationalism. Secular implies, for Said, a critique of
nationalism that is enunciated not from an elite but from a minority
position. As Mufti further writes, ‘Said’s use of the word secular is there-
fore catachrestic, in the sense that Spivak has given to the term – that is,
it is a meaningful and productive misuse. It is an invitation to rethink,
from within the postcolonial present, the narrative of progress that
underlies the very notion of secularization’ (Mufti, 1998: 107).2
Therefore, if we extrapolate from this, we intend the postsecular as
another challenge to the legitimizing and normative narrative of Western
modernity, one that contests the ‘secularization myth’ as a prerequisite
for democracy and progress. Though these ‘posts’ (postsecular and post-
colonial) can never be seen as interchangeable, they signal a deconstruc-
tive manoeuvre which contests fixed notions of political subjectivities
and affective belonging.

Digital postsecularism

In this chapter we want to explore, therefore, the notion of postsecu-

larism as one of the many disjunctions and differences in the global
cultural economy which signal the need for a renewed understanding
of the relation between migration, technology, and religious belonging.
Appadurai explains how previous thoughts of separate centre-periphery
models and push and pull (in terms of migration theory) do not
154 Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

correspond to the movements of cultural expression. For this we need

to take into account diasporic movements and the new circulation of
goods, people, media, ideas, and money in order to make sense of the
tensions between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogeniza-
tion, and how locations, identities, and imaginaries are constantly on
the move (Appadurai, 1996).
Though the relation between religion and media (both old and
new media) has received attention in recent studies (Couldry, 2003;
Højsgaard and Warburg, 2005; Hoover, 1988, 2006; Mitchell and
Marriage, 2003; Morgan, 2008; Nynäs, Lassander, and Utriainen, 2012;
Stolow, 2010), the link to (new) media studies, and the way in which
‘religion’ manifests itself and is reconfigured online, has not been suffi-
ciently elaborated upon, especially in the combination between theo-
retical and empirical approaches. In her recent Digital Religion (2012),
Heidi Campbell argues, for example, that different religious communi-
ties negotiate complex relationships with new media technologies in
light of their history and beliefs. This requires the further exploration
of the nexus between postcolonial studies and new media studies, in
order to address the racialization of religions as new forms of cultural
and political exclusion along with emerging critiques of multi-layered
digital inequalities (Huggan, 2010; Nayar, 2010; Nakamura and Chow-
White, 2012; Gajjala, Yartey, and Birzescu, 2013). For this purpose the
link between the postsecular debate, postcolonialism, and digital culture
in Europe, and in particular the Netherlands, is explored, focusing on
how religion, or religious practices, are lived, articulated, and performed
online, responding to public debates as well as to intimate needs.
Europe, the geographical context of our study, can be understood as
being coterminous with Christianity, its later project of secularization,
up to the contemporary question of European Identity in relation to the
EU expansion and consolidation. These questions culminate in anxie-
ties regarding the integration of post-communist Eastern Europe, secular
Turkey and its predominant Muslim populations, and also in particular
the frictions with European Muslim youth, mostly descendants of guest
workers from Morocco and Turkey (Baban and Keyman, 2008). In the
contemporary European urban centres, the dividing lines between reli-
gion and the secular are increasingly blurred (Beaumont and Baker,
2011). In particular, the returning of postsecular frictions with Muslim
populations are largely played out in the digital sphere, including the
controversies surrounding Theo van Gogh’s 2004 Submission, the Danish
Muhammad cartoons in 2005, Geert Wilders’s 2008 Fitna, and Nakoula
Bassely Nakoula’s 2012 Innocence of Muslims, and recent controversies
 Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice 155

across Europe over YouTube videos and Facebook pages supporting

Islamic State (IS) violence in Iraq (Vis, Zoonen, and Mihelj, 2011).
This chapter focuses on the discursive participation of young, urban,
Muslim migrants in digital culture as this provides an uncharted entry
point to explore the complex trajectories of European metropolitan
postsecularism and postcolonialism (Salvatore, 2004). By examining
digital practices of Moroccan-Dutch young people our aim is to inves-
tigate how the ‘postsecular’ is enacted and experienced from different
positionalities and medium specificities. This chapter explores
how issues of religion are surfacing and being negotiated online by
Moroccan-Dutch migrant youth between 12 and 18 years old. In
particular, we draw upon survey findings, qualitative in-depth inter-
views, and ethnography, and demonstrate how this data speaks back
to new media, postcolonial, and postsecular thinking. We specifically
approach digital practices from two analytic angles: the public sphere
where collective counter-publics are created in order to respond to the
racialization of religion in the public domain, and the individual realm
through the creation of intimate and affective belongings that create
identity networks.
The first angle concerns the online formation of safe collective
spaces, or digital ‘subaltern counterpublics’ (Fraser, 1990: 67). Nancy
Fraser developed this notion in extension of Jürgen Habermas’s ideal-
type of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’. In Habermas’s view, society
resolved around a singular, all-embracing public sphere. Fraser rightly
noted this conceptualization does not meet the demands to capture
the reality of contemporary stratified societies. Rather, she recognizes
that a multiplicity of competing publics provide arenas for subordi-
nated groups. By circulating ‘counter-discourses’ these people can
engage in ‘discursive contestation’ (Fraser, 1990: 62). Online discus-
sion forums provide subordinated groups with particular counter-
publics; away from the mainstream they can be seen as safe ‘hush
harbors’ where hegemonies can be scrutinized and group cohesion can
be fostered (Byrne, 2008: 17). In particular, we argue Moroccan-Dutch
youth appropriate forum discussion pages as counter-publics through
which they forge relations and establish their own shared space to
counteract, subvert, or engage with dominant spheres of state-based
secular culture, defiant public media reports, and parental versus peer
expectations with its imposition of dictums and norms about proper
religious behaviour.
The second angle is dedicated to the analysis of religion as being
part of affective belongings and emotional networks. Digital everyday
156 Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

experiences illustrate the workings of affective belongings. The affective

encounter of bodies with digital artifacts shifts attention from under-
standing processes of symbolic meaning making towards apprehending
digital practices as sparking emotions, feelings, and experiences that
matter to the individual user (Karatzogianni and Kuntsman, 2012).
Online, religion is not something exceptional and visible only in the
public sphere (where it gets attacked) but is also intimate, private, and
personal, subject to multiple interpretations and tied to multiple other
belongings. In particular, we unpack the postsecular notion of ‘cool
Islam’ (Boubekeur, 2005; Gazzah, 2009; Meyer, 2011), which captures
how religiosity is infused with youth culture. By combining Islam
cultural signs with fashion, life styles, and music, religion is re-appropri-
ated to counter stereotypes and negotiate multiple affective belongings
that often steer away from either identity politics or the embracing of a
delocalized brand of global youth. Migrant youth digital practices show
how religion is a cultural and affective marker that is used both to affirm
diversity while practising inclusion. It connects the intimate with the
political through several forms of negotiations which are shown through
forms of self-profiling. In particular, we take the practice of hyperlinking
as an entry point to address the intersection between affectivity and
digital media experiences that span local, national, and transnational
contexts.
Postcolonial and postsecular readings of religious practices online
allows to detect how the postsecular condition is not a new label, or
particularly expresses the revival of religion and religiosity among
Muslim migrant youth as distinctive form of identification, but a
public and private everyday practice that is deeply embedded in digital
affordances and networks (Lynch, 2010; Meyer, 2011).

Moroccan-Dutch youths in the Netherlands: society and

academy

Moroccan-Dutch youths have become the primary locus of fear over

ethnic and religious otherness in the Netherlands. Consisting of 355,883
people, those of Moroccan-Dutch descent make up some 2.1 per cent of
the total Dutch population of 16.6 million. Of this group, 47 per cent
migrated to the Netherlands from the 1960s onwards as guest workers,
while the second and third generations, who were born in the Netherlands
after their parents had migrated, amount to 53 per cent (CBS, 2011). The
majority of guest workers who arrived in the Netherlands originate from
the northern Morocco Rif area, where people mostly identify as Berber
 Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice 157

in contrast with French- and Arab-speakers in Morocco’s urban areas

(Gazzah, 2009: 403–404).
Moroccan-Dutch young people receive a lot of attention in media
reporting, governmental policymaking, and scholarly research. They are
systematically stigmatized and made hypervisible by right-wing journal-
ists and politicians, who frame them as anti-citizens that pose a threat
to secular Dutch society. Time and time again, politicians such as anti-
Islamic Member of Parliament Geert Wilders and fellow members of his
Freedom Party (PVV) argue that the Netherlands has to strongly respond
strongly to the so-called ‘Moroccan problem’ it is facing. Simultaneously,
parental expectations experienced by Moroccan-Dutch youth born in
the Netherlands may differ from Dutch (youth) cultural expectations.
Gender is of central concern in these processes as boys and girls relate
differently to both Dutch society and Islam. Their position about Islam
also differs in the public debates in the Netherlands. The stereotypical
positions, racisms, and expectations they face are not the same (Farris
and Jong, 2013). While boys are dominantly framed in mainstream news
media as criminals or Islamic extremists, they are believed to achieve
greater autonomy from their parents during adolescence (Pels and Haan,
2003). Two prejudiced discourses can be recognized to discipline Muslim
girls in the Netherlands: secular (neo)Orientalist representations of
backwardness and oppression by Muslim men and conservative Islamist
discourses that criticize Western women as sex objects (Piela, 2012).
Thus, young Moroccan-Dutch people have to carve out a path between
notions of European secularity and gendered Dutch stereotypes, but
also sometimes stringent views of their parents and the wider (Islamic)
community (Brouwer, 2006).
In studies on the Moroccan-Dutch community, the focus has predom-
inantly been on juvenile delinquency, mental health problems, reliance
on social security benefits, discrimination in the labour market, and
early school leaving (i.e., Jong, 2007; Crul and Heering, 2008; Farris and
Jong, 2013). In studies of Internet use and religion, the focus is also often
on excesses such as Islamic radicalization (i.e., Stekelenburg, Oegema,
and Klandermans, 2011). These issues are undeniably important, but
focusing on them singles out a narrow slice of their experiences. Things
are going well for the majority of Moroccan-Dutch youths, but their
realities remain largely invisible in contemporary debates. This chapter
aims to provide greater insight in everyday realities of Moroccan-Dutch
youths by considering their digital negotiation with multiple publics,
taking into account how postcolonial issues intersect with notions of
postsecularim.
158 Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

Methodological framework

The fieldwork was conducted in the context of Wired Up, a collabo-

rative, international research project operating at the interface of the
humanities and social sciences, aimed at understanding the multifarious
implications of digital media use among young migrants. By combining
large-scale questionnaires with in-depth interviews and virtual ethnog-
raphies, we join differently located and situated but complimentary
perspectives.
From early spring to late fall 2010, a survey sample of 1408
secondary school students was established among seven schools in the
Netherlands through a collective effort of data collection. This article
principally considers data from 344 Moroccan-Dutch students – 181
girls and 163 boys – who participated in the questionnaire. On average
they are 14.5 years old and, when prompted, 98.5 per cent describe
themselves as Muslim. Three-quarters (76.2 per cent) of these young
people speak Dutch at home with their parents, both in combination
with a Berber language (66.9 per cent) and with Moroccan-Arabic (52.6
per cent).
From all survey participants, 30 Moroccan-Dutch young people aged
12–16 were invited to join the second phase of the study that consisted
of face-to-face in-depth interviews. In order to include 17- and 18-year-
olds, 13 Moroccan-Dutch youths were contacted using snowballing
methods in three cities. In sum, in-depth interviews were carried out
with a group of 43 Moroccan-Dutch individuals, 21 girls and 22 boys
between 12 and 18 years old. Their average age was 15 years. Except
for four informants who have migrated themselves at a young age, the
majority of the interviewees were born in the Netherlands from parents
who had migrated to the Netherlands as guest workers. Interviews took
place in winter 2010 and spring 2011, but additional conversations for
the present chapter were held during winter 2012.
In the third and final phase, digital media texts, images, and
videos circulating in online message boards, instant messaging, social
networking sites, and video-sharing platforms such as YouTube were
gathered through virtual ethnography, a form of online participant-
observation. The informants found these four Internet applications
most important and spent most of their time there. The ethnography
included continued correspondence with informants both face-to-face
as well as mediated via Internet applications such as instant messenger
and social networking sites such as Facebook and its Dutch counterpart
Hyves (Leurs, 2012).
 Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice 159

Case study 1: Message boards as subaltern counter-publics

It is a sort of support. As a process of feeding [your emotions], by sort

of reacting to each other. You’ll have everyone who backs you up. It’s
like everyone is on the same side. You kind of become more sure of
yourself. You just know, yes, look we are not the only ones who think
this way and so on. Thus you can express your opinion and just put
everything up and you hear that others are similar to you.
– Ilham, 13 years old

The first case study explores how Internet applications are used by
Moroccan-Dutch youth as safe arenas to form counter-publics and exert
agency. During our interview, Ilham eloquently described the emotional
support she receives from being able to secure speaking power on the
online discussion forum Marokko.nl. Message boards, also known as
Internet discussion forums, are digital spaces where users can engage in
conversations by publicly posting messages in response to each other.
Seizing the opportunity to speak for herself and hearing others appreciate
her voice, Ilham self-consciously claims membership within a group of
people of her choice. Virginie Mamadouh observed that online message
boards seems to hold a specific appeal: ‘young Dutch Moroccans are
more likely to discuss and dispute Moroccan and Dutch traditions in the
safe encounter of quasi-anonymous forums than in face-to-face contacts
with relatives, peers or teachers’ (Mamadouh, 2001: 271). This section
elaborates how online discussion forums such as Marokko.nl can be used
to construct ‘subaltern counter-publics’, which Nancy Fraser defined as
‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups
invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional inter-
pretations of their identities, interests, and needs’ (Fraser, 1990: 67).
Online forums allow for the proliferation of new, oppositional, and/or
alternative voices in the digital public domain, countering mainstream
definitions of secularism and integration.
Although message boards are, in principle, publicly accessible to all
Internet users, the informants perceive Marokko.nl as a welcoming
space to publish and read alternative voices. The site, in their view,
operates under the radar. For instance 14-year-old Senna states, ‘I don’t
know, I think that half of the [Dutch] people does not even know that it
exists’. Message boards’ perceived hidden character, tucked away from
the mainstream, has been acknowledged as a main reason minority
groups become attracted to them. Dara Byrne describes message boards
that ‘fly well below the mainstream radar’, frequented by minorities
160 Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

such as AsianAvenue.com, MiGente.com, and BlackPlanet.com with

the postcolonial term ‘hush harbors’, a notion used to describe spaces
in which slaves gathered away from supervision from their white
masters (2008). As a space to negotiate unequal power relations, Vorris
Nunley notes that historically ‘African Americans have utilized camou-
flaged locations, hidden sites, and enclosed places as emancipatory cells
where they can come in from the wilderness, untie their tongues, speak
the unspoken, and sing their own songs to their own selves in their
own communities’ (Nunley, 2004: 223). In parallel, the hushedness
of Internet forums, Byrne writes, is appreciated among ethnic minori-
ties for developing ‘group cohesion’ and a shared sense of belonging.
Because the right of access is based on foregrounding a shared ethnicity,
dedicated discussion forums are ‘relatively free of mass participation by
ethnic outsiders’ (Byrne, 2008: 17). More specifically, we focus in this
section on how online forums are taken up among the informants as
counter-publics to (re)articulate their positionality at the crossroads of
gender, ethnicity, and religion. In our conversation, Ilham explained she
receives emotional support to both negotiate the sometimes stringent
religious expectations of her parents as well as the Dutch stereotypical
representation of Moroccan-Dutch youth. The multiple roles online
message boards play in the lives of these young people are explored:
first attention is given to the ways in which generation-specific reli-
gious and gendered dictums are negotiated, while secondly the use of
these forums to contest Dutch societal stereotypes is discussed. In this
way, theoretical discussion on postsecularism is grounded in everyday
practices and affinity networks.

Negotiating religious dictums

I was born and raised here in the Netherlands. But my father

emigrated to the Netherlands together with my grandfather when he
was 18 years old. He has taken Moroccan customs to the Netherlands
and he uses them here. I think the habits of my parents are just very
old-fashioned, even though they do try to learn the customs of the
Netherlands. My parents were raised much stricter in terms of reli-
gion. My parents do teach me many things about our belief, but most
of the time I go on and look up things about Islam myself. This is
different from what they did: listening to the stories of their parents
and copying those.
– Meryam, 15 years old
 Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice 161

During our interview, 15-year-old Meryam spoke about Handboek voor

Moslimvrouwen (Handbook for Muslim Women), a book that she had in
her handbag. She shared that she liked to keep a book like that with
her at all times: ‘I read those, because it gives you a lot of rules and how
you can do your best to become a good Muslim woman’. These books
give her something to hold on to, offering guidance in making everyday
decisions. For similar purposes, she turns to Marokko.nl to read about
personal stories that people have shared. The book, she notes, was
bought ‘at the mosque and it gives you rules to abide by’. However, she
says ‘on the Internet, you can learn much more. In the mosque you have
to listen to an imam who exposes you to topics you might not want to
learn or that you know already’. While ‘on Marokko.nl, I type “Islam”
and many different pages appear. And I look at those’. Meryam described
how she ‘noses around’ in discussions on Islam. The tension between
Meryam being given meanings by authorities such as the imam and
her parents and taking the opportunity to articulate personal religious
interpretations herself lies at the heart of this section on the negotia-
tion of religious dictums. Online, the specificity of Moroccan-Dutchness
emerges as the informants publicly negotiate postsecular positionalities
at the crossroads of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, generation, and
youth culture.
Bibi (16 years old) said she feels at home on the forum because there,
she says, she can experience ‘that proper Moroccan atmosphere’. Such
remarks resonate feelings among informants that message boards can be
seen as a digital counterpart to the mosque. Another example is shared
by Soufian (13 years old): ‘I find it very important to go to the mosque,
because there I feel I am among likeminded people’, while on Marokko.
nl users also congregate with like-minded peers. She continues, ‘it is
your own circle’ and ‘the people there are like you, that’s nice’. Inas,
a 13-year-old girl, explains that online ‘you have the feeling you get
nearer to each other, you feel connected’.
As a distinct invocation of a counter-public sphere our informants
report to engage in religious meaning-making activities. Sixteen-year-old
Ilana states that in the rubric ‘Islam and me’, ‘many things about Islam
are discussed, also the rules of Islam’. Sahar, a 14-year-old girl, also partic-
ipates in the discussions in this rubric and adds that people exchange
ideas ‘about things you should and you should not do’. Negotiating
sometimes-strict Muslim demands with Dutch liberal youth culture,
informants told us that many young users discuss whether certain
things are ‘halal’ (allowed in Islam) or ‘haram’ (forbidden in Islam). For
162 Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

example, as Ferran, a 14-year-old boy, says: ‘whether you may have a

boyfriend and so on’.
Moroccan-Dutch girls are sometimes seen as gatekeepers ‘to main-
taining the family honour’, and Pels and De Haan recognize ‘they still
face the most restrictions, and they spend much of their leisure time
with female family members and friends in domestic settings’ (Pels and
Haan, 2003: 52–61). Especially Moroccan-Dutch girls confess they feel
less restricted on discussion forums and, because of that, dare to bring
up personal experiences they struggle with and cannot share elsewhere.
During the interviews, it became apparent that online discussion forums
are considered a safe space to speak about gendered taboo issues that
might transgress the limits of dominant community standards. Bibi
(16 years old) reports that she turned to Marokko.nl to discuss issues of
intercourse and sexuality in the context of marriage, stating she would
rather turn to the online community instead of bringing it up with her
parents:

[Y]ou don’t dare to go to your parents, because you find it really

embarrassing. Yes, for example about sex or something, and marriage,
and then they say, ‘Yes’ because with the Muslim faith when you
have the first day you are not to oppose your husband and just do ‘it’.
And [with] these things I’m definitely not going to my parents ‘Mom,
dad, listen, is that the case’. Yes it is hchouma you know, I am shy to
tell my parents about these things.

Having a space to discuss issues that are difficult to broach in conversa-

tions with parents is of the utmost importance. This enables Moroccan-
Dutch girls to express themselves and discuss behaviour that is not
possible in their usual social-cultural spheres. Not everyone appreciates
bottom-up interpretations of what is haram or halal. Some see disadvan-
tages in online performances of religion, as Nevra, a 16-year-old girl,
critiques that ‘you now see that people who are engaged with their faith,
they actually make a personal version of their faith. They do things that
they are not allowed to do, because many people do it [and share their
actions online], they say, they can also do it’. Inas, a 13-year-old partici-
pant, also voiced her scepticism about online discussions on Islam: ‘I do
not try to find too many things about it’. She chooses to uphold her own
conceptions about Islam: ‘those are my own opinions. And no one should
change them’. Nonetheless, these forum discussions remain popular.
In her study on online discussion forum use, Lenie Brouwer found that
Moroccan-Dutch girls in their message board participation ‘demonstrate
 Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice 163

counterviews towards the dominant western image of Muslim women

as well as to their own communities’ (Brouwer, 2006). The remarks
informants made resonate her argument: participating in online forums,
Moroccan-Dutch girls turn to message boards to engage with topics such
as health, meeting new friends, intimacy, romantic relationships, and
sexuality (Leurs, Midden, and Ponzanesi, 2012). Girls report to experi-
ence a greater sense of freedom to discuss the sometimes-stringent social-
cultural codes of socialization of their parents and wider community.
In this way, religious dictums from the community as well as expecta-
tions and requests from the hosting society about gender agency and
freedom are appropriated and abrogated in specific personal ways. By
doing so, normative ideas about emancipation as a secularizing process
are deconstructed.

Countering stereotypes
Users appreciate discussion sites such as Marokko.nl because they can
communicate with their own circle of people and share or hear alter-
native voices regarding Moroccan communities in the Netherlands.
The existence of this religious-ethnic-minority communication plat-
form to some extent reflects the need for this group to have a medi-
ated voice and counter-public of their own. This corner of the Internet
is often used to discuss and reframe dominant images circulating in
news media. Thirteen-year-old Salima describes Dutch news media
as follows: ‘they speak about Moroccans very often. If it would be a
Turk or someone else, then it is not immediately news or so, but when
there are Moroccans involved, it is immediately like: all right, these
are Moroccans, instantly on the news’. Ideally, national news media
reflect the broad dynamics of a society, including the multicultural
dimension of that society, however in the Netherlands, ethnic minori-
ties feel as though coverage is skewed (D’Haenens et al., 2004: 69).
Fourteen-year-old Senna remarks that, ‘on Marokko.nl you also get
news, news is discussed, it is more about Moroccan news and so on.
That you do not find in de Telegraaf [a popular sensationalist Dutch
newspaper]’. Sixteen-year-old Nevra finds ‘there is often negative talk
about Moroccan youths’, while ‘different stories’ can be shared on
Internet forums.
Interviewees especially emphasized the heated debates over contro-
versial Dutch anti-Islamic Member of Parliament Geert Wilders on
Marokko.nl. They have a sense that Wilders can say whatever he likes,
while everything Moroccan-Dutch young people say is put under the
microscope. On the forum, interviewees feel more secure and confident
164 Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

to speak out than they might feel elsewhere. In the words of Bibi
(16 years old):

The main topic mainly concerns Geert Wilders and so on. He of all
people can say things about Muslims. While we for instance cannot
talk about the Jews, because then we are the racists. About those
things, we say ‘Why is he allowed to do it,’ and to be honest, everyone
thinks he is a retard, a dog; we do not like him at all.

Fifteen-year-old Inzaf maintains that message boards such as Marokko.nl

help Moroccan-Dutch youths to cope with negative positions ascribed.
Site members share a number of ideas that also bond them together.
They all refute the polarizing brought forth by Wilders and the PVV:

We speak about various Moroccan things, but we agree about one

thing. For instance about Geert Wilders, all of Marokko.nl agrees
that he is no good, or that he lost his mind. On Hyves it would be
different; everyone would have a different opinion. You have very
few people who have a totally different opinion. Everyone would
think something like, ‘yeah if I see him on the streets, I will shoot
him dead’, and then you have few people who would say something
like ‘No why? He is not doing anything wrong?’

Marokko.nl is considered as a safe space of one’s own where people

agree upon a shared set of assumptions. Perpetuating the stereotypical
frames of extremism, at first glance the statement by Inzaf demonstrates
how forum contributors are complicit in perpetuating the othering of
the Moroccan-Dutch community as a whole. However, the statement is
only a polemic mimicry of extremism, as it is to be read in the context
of cultural repertoires of street language and hip-hop youth culture.
Her way of expressing her feelings about the debate in the Netherlands
can therefore be interpreted as a ‘diss’, a strong carnivalesque polemic,
instead of an actual death wish. For Mikhail Bakhtin, the carniva-
lesque refers to ‘peculiar folk humor that always existed and has never
merged with the official culture of the ruling classes’ (Bakhtin, 1965:
474), which may include ‘ridicule of officialdom, inversion of hier-
archy, violations of decorum and proportion’ (Brandist, 2001). The
carnivalesque is a theatrical form of parody that can offer resistance
to hegemonic forms. The controversial song ‘Hirsi Ali Diss’ by the
Moroccan-Dutch rappers DHC from The Hague is another example of
carnivalesque ridicule. In the song, Somalian-Dutch prominent Islam
 Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice 165

critic Hirsi Ali was similarly dismissed: ‘We are busy preparing for your
liquidation / Bomba action, against Hirsi Ali / That is my reaction for
the unrest she is making / Talking on TV about integration’ (lyrics to
‘Hirsi Ali Dis’, 2004). In this song, coarse language of the street, asser-
tive dissing, and the demand for respect come together in a reaction on
the Dutch debate on integration. Verbally threatening Hirsi Ali in the
song is DHC’s way of forming a response to being mistreated (Koning,
2005). In the global, linguistic flows of hip-hop youth culture, ‘the-
violence-as-verbal metaphor’ is a significant example of a particular
politics of language (Newman, 2009: 200).
Similarly, Inzaf’s statement is a part of such a verbal duel expressed as a
culmination of feelings of discrimination, injustice, and subordination.
Inzaf shows how deep the feeling of being disrespected by anti-Islamic
Dutch people runs among Moroccan-Dutch youths. Symptomatic of the
social injustice inflicted on the Moroccan-Dutch community, they reveal
a great deal about their perception of Dutch political and societal centres
of power. As Soufian shared: ‘I think that non-believers, not all of them,
are very much discriminating in their thinking and talking about my
belief, and that makes me very sad’, adding ‘we live in a multicultural
society and I am of the opinion you should accept every human being
as he or she is and treat his [or her] religion with respect’. However,
maintaining contact and discussing intersecting matters of religiosity,
gender, and ethnicity cannot be seen in isolation from other prominent
digital activities such as publishing personal affective belongingness to
various communities on social networking sites. The postsecular notion
of disengagement with Eurocentric master narratives gets grounded and
interwoven with multiple positionalities.

Islam and other affective belongingness

The second case concerns the personal, affective side of digital Muslim
manifestations on profile pages. When prompted, 98.5 per cent of the
Moroccan-Dutch youth who participated in our survey described them-
selves as Muslim. The question arises how they understand and circulate
their Muslimness, especially in connection with other affective youth-
cultural belongings. Affect is a translation from the Latin term affectus
which can be understood as ‘passion’, ‘emotion’, and ‘desire’. We
consider the cultural politics of affectivity as theorized by Sarah Ahmed.
She argued that emotions are doings that should not only be considered
as mental states but also as ‘social and cultural practices’ (Ahmed, 2004:
9). Her focus is on how emotions arise from the contact of people with
166 Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

material objects. Affectivity may cement personal attachments to groups

of people, things, or ideas. Exploring affectivity and digital practices, for
example, Lena Karlsson noted that the affective pleasures of women’s
diary blog reading stem from their search for various forms of ‘recogni-
tion’ and shifting alliances of ‘sameness’ along the lines of gender, age,
and race/ethnicity (Karlsson, 2007: 138). Below, we unravel how religion
is digitally remediated, showing how the personal ‘Islamic touch’ revives
religion by absorbing it in a cool youth-cultural endeavour that links the
everyday needs of a growing multicultural youth generation.

‘An Islamic touch’

Among Moroccan-Dutch young people, both online and offline, ‘Islam
is used to give music, fashion, food, style or cultural imagery in general
an Islamic touch’ (Gazzah, 2009: 413). Islamic street-wear and the pres-
ence of Muslim rappers allows for the performance of a contemporary
urban-based ‘cool Islam’ (Boubekeur, 2005; Meyer, 2011). In this second
case study, we propose how an ‘Islamic touch’, as digitally published,
must be understood in its relationship with multiple networks of affec-
tive belongingness, including youth culture.
In our questionnaire, we asked respondents which subcultural affili-
ations they would include on their personal social networking profile
page (see Figure 8.1). Roughly half of the respondents reports to publish
affiliations with a Muslim subculture and one-fifth see themselves as
urban and hip hop. Gender differences become apparent; girls affiliate
themselves more with dance music and being trendy and fashionable
while boys see themselves more as sporty. As described in the previous
section, religious positions are negotiated on Internet forums. It can
be noted that defining oneself by expressing ‘I am Muslim’ for many
Moroccan-Dutch youths has become a more positive way to articulate
one’s individual identity as opposed to an ascribed ethnic identity such
as ‘you are allochthonous’3 or ‘you are a c**t-Moroccan’. However, next
to hip hop, urban, and the like, Moroccan-Dutch young people chose to
be ‘Muslim online’ (Buitelaar, 2008: 244–247).
During the interviews, informants expanded on religious elements they
incorporated in their self-presentations. Underlining ethnic proudness
and wearing the headscarf as an important identity marker, 13-year-old
Inas describes her construction of a personal profile page as follows: ‘it’s
like, I’m wearing a headscarf. When I post a photo of me wearing a
headscarf, you can so to say see that I have an Islamic background. And
with my name and so on’. Furthermore, interviewees report to highlight
their attachment to Islam by including religious acclimations such as
 Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice 167

8
Other 9.9
18.4
Urban (rap/R&B/soul) 17.7
Sports 47.9
8.3
Muslim 42.9
53.6
0
Metal / rock / punk 0
1.2
Emo 1.7
0.6
Preppy 1.1
22.1 Boys Girls
Hip-hop 19.9
0.6
Gothic 1.7
4.3
Gabber / techno 1.1
Trendy / fashionable 0.6
13.8
Dance 3.7
18.8
Alternative 2.5
0
1.8
Activist
4.4
No group 22.1
28.2
0 10 20 30 40 50 60

Figure 8.1 Subcultural youth group self-identifications among Moroccan-Dutch

youths (percentages, multiple answers possible, n = 344)

‘Inshallah’ (God willing) in their nicknames or by showing they are a

member of groups pertaining to Islam on their online profile page.
However, Safae (18 years old) reported that signalling Muslim affini-
ties sometimes backfires: ‘I have a girlfriend, and she wears a headscarf.
On Hyves she got a message from someone stating “we live in 2010, a
headscarf is outdated, it’s something of the past”. That was bad, you
can’t say that. I feel that is discrimination’. Such discriminatory prac-
tices were also, for instance, apparent in computer game culture. A fan
of the game Counter-Strike, 15-year-old Oussema shared that he had bad
experiences after he disclosed his ethnic and religious background to
white Dutch players he encountered while playing the game: ‘When
saying I am Moroccan, I am a Muslim, I get called a terrorist’. Similarly,
discussing YouTube videos pertaining to the country of Morocco,
16-year-old Naoul said: ‘When you watch a video on YouTube, they shout
168 Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

“c**t-Moroccans” and this and that about Moroccans’. However,

beyond such polarizing remarks that seek to categorize and essentialize
Moroccan-Dutch youth identities, the following section demonstrates
informants employ various tactics to express multiple belongingness.
Signalling the cultural politics of global-local flows of people, technol-
ogies, and feelings, the affective encounter of bodies with media objects
such as hyperlinks shifts attention from processes of meaning making
towards apprehending them as experiences that matter (Karatzogianni
and Kuntsman, 2012). Digital practices on their own do not determine
feelings, but the affective relationship between groups of individuals
with particular signs – such as a cool Islam – can make them matter as
they ‘weave’ the virtual and the real (Gajjala, Yartey, and Birzescu, 2013:
50). The notion of the everyday as affective gets invoked, as religion is
not something exceptional and visible only in the public sphere (where
it gets attacked) but is also intimate, private, personal, and subject to
multiple interpretations. How the online world captures this dynamic is
of particular relevance for the younger generations located at the cross-
roads between traditional ideas of religious behaviour and more fluid,
negotiable, transnationalized ideas of being a good Muslim/Muslima.
Online, various sources can be found on how to do things properly,
how to wear a chador, to pray, to read the Koran, and so forth. However
the new spaces created online for religious subculture also hint at the
tensions between expectations and choices, respect and self-determina-
tion, radicalized practices and fluid negotiations. The ambivalence and
liberatory character of personal affective renderings of religion online
can be traced by following hypertextual links. These are as Odin writes
(cited in Landow, 2006) the ideal format to contest linear and authori-
tative narratives, applying through material practices the principle of
postcolonialism and postsecularism.

Hypertextual selves
At the beginning of our interviews, informants were invited to reflect
on their personal positioning. Thirteen-year-old Ilham for example
described herself stating ‘I am Moroccan, Berber and Muslim, but as you
can see I hold the Dutch nationality’. Sixteen-year-old Amir states, ‘I have
my own personal style, and I don’t belong to one group in particular, it
is just multiculti, I feel’. In a similar vein, Oussema asserts: ‘My religion
is Islam, but it does not play a big role in my life. However, the projected
image that [arises] when saying I have Islamic roots, does play a role. I
like to surprise people by behaving in a way that does not [fit] with how
they project my people’. We want to zoom in on hyperlinking practices
 Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice 169

to show how Moroccan-Dutch youth digitally destabilize narrow inter-

pretations of Moroccan-Dutchness and Islam.
Social networking sites allow users to add hyperlinks to their personal
profile pages, publish preferences, and participate in and affiliate with
interest-based communities. Through the publishing of hyperlinks,
informants render visible their distributed personal affective belong-
ings. Jaishree Odin argued hyperlinking practices shape an aesthetic
that can accommodate the multiplicity of postcolonial subjectivity:
‘[t]he perpetual negotiation of difference that the border subject engages
in creates a new space that demands its own aesthetic’. Hypertext
aesthetic, she proposes ‘represents the need to switch from the linear,
univocal, closed, authoritative aesthetic involving passive encounters
characterizing the performance of the same to that of non-linear, multi-
vocal, open, non-hierarchical aesthetic involving active encounters that
are marked by repetition of the same with and in difference’ (cited in
Landow, 2006: 356–357). We would like to emphasize that hypertex-
tual selves not only demonstrates a postcolonial aesthetic but also docu-
ments the workings of postsecular digital practices.
Upon joining a Hyves group, a small icon appears on a personal profile
page. On her Hyves personal profile page, 13-year-old Midia hyper-
links to a variety of groups ranging from feminist interests (‘Women
in Charge’) and Dutch nationalism (‘I love Holland’) to food cultures
relating to both migration backgrounds (‘Choumicha, the Moroccan
and Turkish kitchen’, ‘Moroccan tea junky’) as well as global junk food
(‘McDonald’s’). She expresses belonging to religious interests (‘Hijaab
Style’, ‘Islam = Peace’), different clothing styles, from headscarves
(‘Respect is what I ask for the headscarf that I’m wearing’) to Moroccan
dresses (‘Moroccan dresses 2009’) and global fashion trends (‘Skinny
Jeans love’ and the brand ‘H&M’). Additionally, she joined the groups
‘Moroccan Male Hotties’ and ‘Show you chose for Freedom – sign up
for the Freedom-Hyves’. These different visual statements cover a wide
spectrum of interests, belongings, and affiliations signalling distributed
recognitions of ‘sameness’ (Karlsson, 2007). Taken together on a profile
page, these different hyperlinks constitute an affective discursive space
of intercultural encounter. In expressing a variety of affective belong-
ings that Midia displays actively, she revalues her ethnic, religious, and
gendered embeddings. This example shows the unexpected postsecular
coalitions Moroccan-Dutch young people signal online rather than a
straightforward continuation of migrant and religious cultures. They
actively transform them in the context of the dominant youth cultures
in which they grow up.
170 Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

Conclusions

In this chapter, by addressing the articulation of religion through the

use of digital media among urban, Muslim, Moroccan-Dutch, young
people, links between postsecular debates, postcolonialism, and digital
culture were established. Internet applications are one of the social
stages where ethnic and religious minority youth struggle to stake out
their individual identities by narrating themselves in various ways.
Our analysis hopefully contributes to countering the implicit resur-
gent conservative reaction in the contemporary European and Dutch
debates on the revival of religion, which tend to isolate Muslims as the
locus of the return of religion as a challenge to democracy, secularism,
and progress.
Contesting the association of religion with backwardness, or straight
‘foreignness’, Moroccan-Dutch youth appropriate Islam, through their
digital practices, as a cool affective marker, not an essentialized cate-
gory, removed from other markers of identity and belonging. Allowing
like-minded youth to connect and inserting in the public sphere alter-
native configurations of believing, forum discussions are recognized
in case study one for circulating self-presentations among like-minded
peers. These under-the-radar processes are recognized to foster agency
through democratization of belief systems and religious authority and
resisting hegemonic renderings of Moroccan-Dutchness and Islam.
Though religion figures as one of the dominant markers of identity
formation it has become an affective everyday practice that is deeply
embedded in digital affordances and networks. Case study two demon-
strated religiosity is never articulated in isolation from other affective
hyperlinked ties such as that of nationality, ethnicity, education, age,
generation, class, and gender. The focus on affectivity is also useful to
counteract prior utopian disembodied understandings of signification
through digital practices.
Through the exploration of these connections it emerges that
digital networks constitute a safe arena to unravel and display one’s
multiple networks of affective belongings. It constitutes also a safe
space to practice piety and alternative forms of religious agency, not
necessarily in conflict with the dictums of the host society which
label religion, and Islam in particular, as blocking youth from inte-
gration and girls, in particular, from their path to emancipation.
Countering these stereotypes and public pressures, forum discussions
and hypertextual aesthetic indicate we should go beyond assessing
the risk of isolation and radicalization of religious groups. It should
 Remediating Religion as Everyday Practice 171

not be forgotten, nonetheless, that the online world is not a separate

sphere from the offline world, and that it often reproduces in more
stark ways, and even reinforces, the dichotomy played out in society
at large. However, as we have tried to show, youth migrant cultures
in the Netherlands manage to create digital practices that both revive
and revisit the notion of religion in everyday life, in playful and, at
times, ironic ways. Hybridization, countering, carnivalesque, humour,
parody, hyperlinking, and posting are some of the postcolonial and
postsecular subversive strategies used that give an Islamic touch to
everyday culture without resorting to violence or public defiance. At
the same time, Islam or religion is re-appropriated and revisited from
new perspectives. This makes the so-called revival of religion part of a
cool endeavour that connect a more cosmopolitan public sphere with
the everyday needs of a growing multicultural youth generation. This
creates new forms of transnational ties and global branding along with
new forms of religious affectivity and piety.

Notes
1. Postcolonialism has always been considered an offspring of postmodernism,
though various critiques have focused on how the ‘post’ in postmod-
ernism is not the same as in ‘post’ colonialism. In his famous essay ‘Is the
“Post” in “Postcolonial” the “Post” in “Postmodern”?’ Appiah suggested,
for example, that both ‘posts’ signal a spacing gesture through which the
prefix remains inextricably connected to the root word (‘modernism’, ‘colo-
nialism’) (Appiah, 1997: 428–429). Therefore, postcolonialism is bound to
the legacy of colonialism it critiques and postmodernism to the modernism
it continues. Obviously these relations are neither chronological nor tele-
ological but are characterized by fracture and tense asymmetries. It is a
‘post’ that challenges master narratives and universalizing discourses,
that aims at opening up the space for silenced histories and marginalized
groups. Nonetheless, while the ‘post’ in postmodern emphasizes pluralism
and multiplicities, the ‘post’ in postcolonialism wants to retain a certain
humanism, or anticolonial humanism that can account for the suffering
of colonial subjects while rejecting the master narratives of modernism
(Appiah, 1997: 438).
2. This is in line with Huggan’s argument in his ‘Is the “post” in “Postsecular”
the “post” in “Postcolonial”,’ who, paraphrasing Appiah on the relation of the
‘posts’ in postmodernism and postcolonialism, explains that postsecularism
should be understood as a shift in the secularization paradigm which particu-
larly applies to Western liberal democracies that ‘are not postsecular at all but
are rather caught in a continuing process of secularization, one symptom of
which is the efflorescence of alternative spiritualities, and another the funda-
mentalist recoil against spiritual pluralism in the context of a consumer orien-
tate late capitalist world’ (Huggan, 2010: 753).
172 Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi

3. In the Netherlands, the term ‘allochtoon’ is widely used to refer to immigrants

and their descendants. Officially the term ‘allochtoon’ is much more specific
and refers to anyone who had at least one parent born outside the Netherlands.
A further distinction is made between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ ‘alloch-
toon’ people. The term is, however, often considered to refer to Moroccan,
Surinamese, and Turkish immigrants to label specific immigrants groups.
Therefore considered as stigmatizing, the city council of Amsterdam decided
to stop using the term in 2013 because of its divisive effect.

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9
Mentality, Fundamentality, and
the Colonial Secular; or How Real
Is Real Estate?
Pamela Klassen

What is a mentality, and when does it become a fundamentality?

Technically speaking, these two words may not be etymologically linked,
but their overlap is instructive for those pondering the meanings and
effects of the ‘secular’. A language of mentalities and imaginaries infuses
writing about both fundamentalism and the secular. While scholars
have often characterized a fundamentalist ‘mindset’ as one lacking in
self-reflexivity or openness to democratic deliberation, so, too, have
they turned to a language of mentality and related concepts – sensibili-
ties, imaginaries, world views – as the dominant frame for explaining
what the secular is, and how its power works (Marty, 1994; Derrida
and Habermas, 2004; Taylor, 2007). Susan Harding, writing specifically
of mid-twentieth-century US ‘secularity’ in its relation to ‘fundamen-
talism’, described the ‘modern secular imaginary’ as a ‘hegemonic social
mentality, a sensibility and code of etiquette’ (Harding, 2009: 1283).
Sociologist Jose Casanova offers a more precise definition, distinguishing
the secular as a ‘modern, epistemic category’ from secularization as a
social and historical process that worked to define and set apart ‘religion’
within civic and political institutions. Secularism, in turn, he described
as a world view or ideology that can be both a principle of statecraft and
a broader, taken-for-granted, modern doxa (Casanova, 2009).
This recent analysis of the secular has insisted that scholars ask hard
questions about their own norms – their own ‘social imaginaries’,
‘mentalities’, and ‘sensibilities’– including those that designate funda-
mentalism as rigidly dogmatic while celebrating secularism as a commit-
ment to open critique (Derrida and Habermas, 2004; Asad, 2009). These
debates about the secular, or what some now call the postsecular, are thus

175
176 Pamela Klassen

posing the question of when a mentality becomes a fundamentality, or

when a group’s implicitly shared way of thinking becomes articulated as
an exclusive way of thinking to which others must accede, often with
both their minds and their bodies (Scott, 2007).
By considering a different layer of etymology resident within the
English-language concepts of fundamental and secular, we can set
another illuminating frame onto the question, one that brings into
relief not only mentalities and imaginaries but also matter and prop-
erty. Fundamental, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) attests, can be
defined as the ‘foundation’ of a building or the ‘base on which some-
thing is built’ (OED, 1989b). Fundament, in turn, has a historical and
geophysical definition of ‘any landscape before colonization by man in
general or by any particular group of men’ (OED, 1989a). The gendered
language may be accidental on the part of the OED, and the reference
to colonization may not be meant to evoke the politics of imperialism;
nevertheless, this definition marks the fundament as a land not yet
spoken for by men who claim it and build upon it. In other words,
the fundament is a ‘wilderness’ about to be ‘civilized’. The word secular
also has OED definitions that mark off matter in place and time. In its
medieval meanings, the secular referred to what was worldly, neither
‘spiritual’ nor of the ‘Church’. In later meanings, secular also denoted
a long-term geophysical process ‘having a period of enormous length;
continuing through long ages’ (OED, 1989c). Historically speaking,
then, secular may refer to places not claimed by the Christian Church
as well as to material processes that proceed according to the clock of
science, not scripture.
In the twentieth century, fundamentalism and the secular took on
new meanings as mutually constituting terms orbiting around the third
concept of religion, a term not exactly denoting Christianity but largely
dominated by it (Wenger, 2009; Asad, 1993). At least at a popular level,
the secular largely came to be defined as that which is not based in
religious authority, with fundamentalism as its most extreme, and reli-
giously undergirded, opposite (Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008: 2). As
feminist and other scholars have demonstrated, however, the funda-
mental and the secular, though both with Christian etymologies, do
not have solely Christian genealogies and embodiments (Jakobsen and
Pellegrini, 2008: 13). In this essay, I attend to one particular context in
which the secular encompassed not only norms of democratic govern-
ance and legal recourse, but also the concepts of real estate or prop-
erty as they emerged within a contested process of Christianization
and colonialism. I show how Christianity has been one implicit and
 Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular 177

explicit foundation for not only secular mentalities, but also for their
material habitations and legal effects. Put another way, fundamentalities
and secularities draw not only from the mind but are also made out of
matter (cf. Hirschkind, 2011).
In ‘colonial secular’ northwestern British Columbia, the focus of my
current research, real estate became, quite literally, contested ground
not only among First Nations, settlers, and colonial officials, but also
among and between missionaries as representatives of the Church and
as ‘private’ capitalist subjects. Texts and rituals coded as ‘religious’ –
sermons, baptisms, school texts, bible translations, catechisms – were
the most obvious of missionaries’ tools for transforming both mentali-
ties and materialities of Aboriginal peoples (Stevens, 2004). Missionaries,
however, also used deeds of land, new zoning laws, and other legal
documents of mapping to give them ownership of land that was newly
subject to the juridico-political ‘mentality’ of real estate (DeRogatis, 2003;
Neylan, 2002). In British Columbia, some missionaries literally repre-
sented both the ‘law’ and ‘God’ in their work – that is, they were both
local magistrates and ministers of the gospel. In other cases, missionaries
strongly resisted what they saw as unjust seizures of Indian land by both
settlers and government (Patterson, 1967; Christophers, 1998; Foster,
2007b; Foster and Berger, 2008).1 Missionaries’ celestial visions paired
with their earthly maps made them powerful yet unpredictable nodes
in the creation of Canada, a nation that has never entirely extricated
its secular, democratic authority from its underpinnings in a Christian
mode of transcendence, by which the law could understand itself, at
root, to be ‘never wrong’ (Berger, 2010: 117).
From the beginnings of ‘British Columbia’, ongoing struggles over the
‘Indian Land Question’ threw into high relief how the seemingly secular
mentality of real estate was actually a fundamentality: an exclusive way
of thinking enforced through a ‘regime of private property’ (Harris,
1997: 136). Real estate, also know as ‘real property’, is founded on the
idea that an individual can gain ‘title’ to a section of land, its build-
ings, and its resources by exchanging money for the right; real prop-
erty is an idea particular to certain legal cultures (Hann, 2007; Bell and
Napoleon, 2009). ‘Alienating’ land through real estate is a practice that,
with enough digging, is shown to be founded on claims of transcend-
ence. In the Canadian case, the Crown claimed the title to the land both
through negotiating treaties with First Nations and through a baldly
imperialistic assertion of its own power. In the case of the vast territory
of Rupert’s Land, the Crown came to own most of northwestern Canada
by purchasing it from the Hudson’s Bay Company, a company which it
178 Pamela Klassen

had earlier chartered (Dickason, 1992). The Canadian state then slowly
parcelled out much of this land to homesteaders, who were by law, men,
and by preference, British (Carter, 2009; Harris, 1997).
This purchase was less than convincing to First Nations. As the
1913 ‘Statement of the Nishga Nation’ exemplifies, First Nations
throughout the northwest repeatedly petitioned the Canadian state
(and sometimes the British Monarch) to acknowledge that they had
never ceded ‘title’ to their land in any treaty:

We lay claim to the rights of men. We claim to be aboriginal inhabit-

ants of this country, and to have rights as such. We claim that our
aboriginal rights have been guaranteed by Proclamation of King
George Third and recognized by Acts of the Parliament of Great
Britain. We claim that holding under the words of that Proclamation
a tribal ownership of the territory, we should be dealt with in accord-
ance with its provision, and that no part of our lands should be taken
from us or in any way disposed of until the same has been purchased
by the Crown. (Anon, 1915)

Though the Nisga’a were willing to play by some of the rules of the ‘rights
of men’, such as adopting the language of title, they also contended
that their own laws and their collective and ancestral presence on the
land from ‘time immemorial’ were legitimate grounds for them to assert
their claims (Harris, 2002; Foster, Raven, and Webber, 2007; Foster and
Berger, 2008). Nisga’a writers were also astute observers of how the state
used Christianity to undergird its territorial authority. They often turned
to the state’s recourse to Christian transcendence as an argument in
support of their own challenges to white settlement, as Nisga’a chief
(and Anglican Church member) Andrew Mercer argued in a 1911 letter
to the editor of the Prince Rupert Evening Empire:

If the surveyor and those that have staked pieces of land up in the
Naas valley wish to come again, let them go to Ottawa first and make
the government settle our land. And if our land is settle, then let the
surveyor and those that have their stake come again, for we do not
want to stop them. But we want a full settlement. Also we want to
right of what is lawful. Same thing as you want to do right, as you
all perceive it from the Holy Bible. Whenever the J.P. or a judge were
in court they used Bible for to do right. We also see and read in it, in
the Holy Bible, that ‘Cursed is he that removeth his neighbor’s land
mark,’ and that you break one of the Ten Commandments, ‘Thou
 Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular 179

shall not covet,’ for you have knock us down and take our possession.
(Mercer, 1911)

Andrew Mercer caught the state in the act of what Talal Asad has called
‘transcendent mediation’, by which the state proclaims its own authority
to be rooted in the demos and yet also stakes itself on divine authority
(Asad, 2003: 5). With a language of rights and commandments, Nisga’a
drew on both secular and biblical norms, while also maintaining their
own ‘social imaginaries’ that rooted authority in communal houses and
ancestral clans (Taylor, 2004).
If to be postsecular is to be thinking and acting with a critical aware-
ness of the powers of the secular, First Nations were postsecular long
before the term was even coined. Their shrewd assessment of the state’s
appeal to Christian authority in claiming the land suggests they may
also have been post-fundamental, or anti-fundamental, in two senses –
they rejected the colonial designation of their land as a supposedly wild
and unsettled ‘fundament’ waiting for settlers, while also naming the
partiality and extremism of the state’s claim to their land under the
sovereignty of the ‘Crown’.
To better understand the importance of these land disputes for the
formation of the colonial secular, I first offer a reading of several key
texts in the recent theorizing of the secular and its others – whether
fundamentalism or the postsecular. I argue that the secular is partly
created through the mutually constitutive relations of colonial modes
of governance and Christian imaginations of moral order (Lutz, 2007:
31). In concert with this colonial Christian logic, the secular becomes a
temporal category that both proclaims its own inevitability and asserts
its ability to continue indefinitely through the ages. At a time when
some accounts of the secular and postsecular seem to be drawing overly
sharp divisions between Christianity and the secular, or even urging a
‘reChristianization’ of scholarship and/or the state, highlighting the
ways that Christianity and the colonial state worked to create the secular
seems particularly urgent (Smith, 2012; Sommerville, 2002).

Fundamentalism, the secular, and Christianization

Applying the label of fundamentalist is one of the most damning of

insults from a ‘secular’ perspective – or, more particularly, from a
perspective that understands ‘religion’ to be a voluntary affiliation that
(ideally) carries no inherent legitimizing authority in the realm of the
state. Understood in this sense, the secular is a space of public discourse
180 Pamela Klassen

and practice in which religious reasons are not admissible, or at least not
very convincing, as arguments for laws, public policies, or communal
norms. To be fundamentalist, in this reading, is to be outside the terms
of secular agreement about the virtues and necessities of peaceful demo-
cratic debate: it is to be unyielding in one’s views, to root one’s ‘world
view’ in a transcendent, divine authority, and to have a readiness for
turning even to violence in support of one’s convictions (Derrida and
Habermas, 2004).
With the rise of ‘fundamentalism’ in many parts of the world, scholars
from a range of disciplines turned sustained attention to the ways that
fundamentalism, both as an ascribed and a native category, was more
than just a stubborn, aggressive mentality – it was a set of practices and
discourses with attendant contradictions, surprising alignments, and
networks of power (Marty, 1994; Harding, 2001). Many scholars have
shown how fundamentalism, while a ‘native’ term especially among
some Christians, is also a pejorative term that, with its connotations of
a threateningly violent transcendence, helps to constitute the ‘secular’
as a sphere of rational, peaceful debate (Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008).
In turn, the secular has also become the focus of critique, and related
concepts such as secularization and the postsecular have all been
advanced as terms with more or less utility, and with more or less direct
connection to Christianity. Where historian David Hollinger suggests
that secularization in the United States would be better described as a
process of ‘deChristianization’, sociologist James Beckford argues that in
the context of Great Britain, Christianity continues to shape notions of
both the secular and the postsecular (Hollinger, 2001; Beckford, 2012).
Enumerating many meanings attributed to the postsecular, Beckford
concludes that many scholars who employ the term in Euro-American
settings are missing a critical historical awareness of the ‘pragmatic settle-
ment’ between the state and religions, especially Christianity: ‘[state]
policies, mechanisms, and practices have long been at work in Britain
to recognize and summon religious identities’ (Beckford, 2012: 13, 16).
This summoning, I would add, calls forth very particular kinds of reli-
gion, namely ones that are willing to pragmatically settle, to accept the
sovereignty of the state, and even to help to produce it.
Whether embodied in the ‘state’ or the ‘public sphere’, secular-
ity’s supposed freedom from religious obligations or compulsions is
certainly not borne out in many of the European and North American
nation-states that invoke the secular as an orientation. Self-professed
secular states have long privileged certain religions – especially
Christianity – in particular spheres such as education, health care,
 Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular 181

and charitable status, and many continue to collect taxes on behalf of

‘established’ churches (Casanova, 2009: 1061). Theorizing the secular
or the postsecular, then, must involve asking the question of how key
secular concepts require a settlement with state sovereignty, and how
this settlement differentially recognizes the authority and ‘sensibility’
of particular religions. Perhaps ‘religious reasons’ undergird or support
even such a ‘secular’ mode of authority as the right to buy and own
land as property. As several political theorists have shown, prominent
early modern theorists of property rights, such as John Locke, not only
developed their theories in relation to Protestant theologies, but also
engaged in political work entwined with Christian missionary colo-
nialism directed at Aboriginal peoples (Waldron, 2002; Tully, 1993).
Property rights and real estate are themselves acts of imagination
surveyed and gridded onto the fundament; they are mentalities that
in the course of colonialism became fundamentalities, rooted in the
transcendence and violence of the state, sworn to with the authority
of the Holy Bible at hand.
The complex relationships among fundamentalism, the secular, and
the violence of the state were fruitfully explored in paired conversa-
tions with the philosophers Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in the
wake of the 2001 Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center. In these
parallel interviews, both Derrida and Habermas considered ‘religion’
and the ‘secular’ to be notably marked by their connection to funda-
mentalism or fanaticism, and both spoke with an awareness of them-
selves as ‘Europeans’ who sought to simultaneously defend and critique
the viability of a rational, secular, violence-free public sphere. Wary of
its ‘pejorative ring’, Derrida and Habermas nevertheless defined the
concept of ‘fundamentalist’ as primarily a matter of mentality backed
up by force: ‘We use this predicate to characterize a peculiar mindset,
a stubborn attitude that insists on the political imposition of its own
convictions and reasons, even when they are far from being ration-
ally acceptable. This holds especially for religious beliefs’ (Derrida and
Habermas, 2004: 31). Comparing contemporary Islam to Christianity, he
suggested that the universalist, religious (i.e., mostly Christian) beliefs of
early modern Europeans had become relativized both by confessionali-
zation and by secularization. This relativizing also bred a self-reflexive
‘cognitive thrust’ that prompted religious ‘believers’ to realize that they
could not successfully use violence to forward their own religious causes.
Positing frozen fundamentalist mentalities vs. secularized cognitive
thrusts, Derrida and Habermas’s ideal mentalities had to keep moving,
supple and adaptive, at the same time that he recognized that even to
182 Pamela Klassen

‘deconstruct’ the self-reflexivity of modernity was to participate in its

mentality of critique (Derrida and Habermas, 2004: 32, 42).
By contrast, Derrida’s recourse to the word ‘fundamentalist’ also turned
to Islam as its object, but paralleled ‘fundamentalist Islam’ with ‘the
United States’s fundamentally Christian professions of faith’, pointing out
the partiality of both (Derrida and Habermas, 2004: 117). Arguing that
the ‘secretly theological-political’ sovereignty of the ‘secular’ state must
be continually deconstructed, Derrida suggested that an understanding of
today’s ‘fundamentalism’ requires a deeper comprehension of ‘our philo-
sophical heritage’, and an awareness of how and when justification is in
play (Derrida and Habermas, 2004: 131). But this kind of awareness or
comprehension did not come easily, in his view: ‘ ... the event is first of all
that which I do not first of all comprehend. Better, the event is first of all
that I do not comprehend’ (Derrida and Habermas, 2004: 90). To be ever
aware of the limits of one’s comprehension, in Derrida’s view, was not to
‘relativize’ into absurdity but to understand critique as an ongoing process
better oriented by the risks of ‘hospitality’ than the grudging accommoda-
tion of ‘toleration’ (Derrida and Habermas, 2004: 128). Defining the job
of the philosopher in a time of terror, Derrida said:

A ‘philosopher’ ... would be someone who analyzes and then draws the
practical and effective consequences of the relationship between our
philosophical heritage and the structure of the still dominant juridico-
political system that is so clearly undergoing mutation. A ‘philosopher’
would be one who seeks a new criteriology to distinguish between
‘comprehending’ and ‘justifying’. (Derrida and Habermas, 2004: 106)

Moving from a European context into a North American one, where

the sovereignty of the state continues to be challenged by First Nations
who make recourse to a different ‘philosophical heritage’ in which both
land and religion are differently configured, Derrida’s task of finding
new criteria for comprehension and judgement requires rethinking the
fundamentals that shape both mind and matter, laws and land. From a
First Nations perspective, it is no secret that the sovereignty of the state
and its claim on the fundament is, in part, justified through recourse to
the theological-political.

Colonial secular spirits

Hovering between considering the secular as a matter of mind and as

a matter of manners, scholars have recognized that their own thinking
 Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular 183

about the ‘secular’ is made that much more difficult by their own
implication in both its ideologies and its habits (Scott, 2007; Asad,
2003; Modern, 2011). Charles Taylor, in one of the most influential of
recent accounts of the secular, has provided perhaps the most widely
adopted mentalist metaphor for thinking about the secular: the ‘imma-
nent frame’. For Taylor, the immanent frame is part of a ‘modern social
imaginary’, which constructs the world as wholly natural and imma-
nent – not supernatural and transcendent. The modern social imagi-
nary of the secular reimagines political power, social organization, and
human nature in such a way that an earlier respect for ‘supernatural’
spirits, transcendent forces, and social hierarchy has been displaced by
a focus on the natural goodness of ordinary life and immanence, in
a world of distinct individuals. While some scholars have argued that
Taylor’s immanent frame is not a mentalist, cognitive metaphor, never-
theless Taylor himself regularly placed the mind and what it believes at
the centre of the frame (Warner, VanAntwerpen, and Calhoun, 2010).
Inhabitants of the immanent frame are secular, modern ‘buffered selves’,
people for whom ‘it comes to seem axiomatic that all thought, feeling
and purpose, all the features we normally can ascribe to agents, must
be in minds, which are distinct from the “outer” world’ (Taylor, 2007:
539). The buffered self is central to Taylor’s argument – the secular age
is rooted in a frame of mind, a world view, a mentality that is held by
largely atomistic individuals in a world bereft of spirits.
Many scholars have demonstrated recently that the secular – at least in
North America – has had plenty of room for a diversity of spirits (Bender,
2010; Klassen, 2011). Taylor’s narrative of an immanent spiritless age,
however, remains widely influential. Arguing that Western thinkers
have largely framed the secular by a ‘subtraction story’ that proceeds via
narratives that claim to ‘strip away’ religious illusions to get at the true,
empirically derived nature of human desire and existence, Taylor insisted
instead that secularity must also be understood as a creative process, by
which freedom, power, mutual benefit, and rational debate are formed
as modern virtues (Taylor, 2007: 579).2 Understanding the secular as a
creative process – that is, a process that made things happen – however,
requires bringing back its spirits and spiritual moorings, especially as
they were at play in the colonization of North America.
As several scholars have noted, Taylor’s account of the secular pays
little attention to the history of colonialism within the Christianity of
the ‘North Atlantic’, thus severing the secular from the profound ways
that it was structured by and created within colonial encounters. Saba
Mahmood, for example, forcefully argues that attention to missionary
184 Pamela Klassen

expansion is crucial to any understanding of the secular, at the same

time that she urges a genealogy of the secular that goes beyond its
Christian formations: ‘The modern nation-state, for example, with its
juridical executive, and administrative functions, enfolds a variety of
conceptions of the self, agency, privacy, publicity, religion, and ethics
that have become globalized. The history of this transformation belongs
less to the Christianization of non-Western societies and more to their
secularization under modern rule’ (Mahmood, 2010: 295). I agree with
Mahmood, that attending only to Christianity will not tell a full story of
the secular nation-state, but suggest that the place to draw the distinc-
tion between Christianization and secularization is not along the lines
of law and governance.
To think the secular through mentalities or imaginaries that are rooted
in individuals, or that separate state administration from Christianity too
strictly, is to miss the social and political processes through which colo-
nialism was effected. These social processes included law and govern-
ance enacted in what anthropologist Ronald Niezen has called a process
of ‘spiritual domination’, in which Christian convictions about the
necessity of converting Aboriginal people intertwined with a capitalist
imagination of the landscape as ripe for ‘resource extraction’ (Niezen
and Burgess, 2000).
In a different register, Courtney Bender has argued that colonialism
and settlement have been crucial to ‘emergent visions of sociality’ in
an America both secular and enchanted. Contending particularly with
Charles Taylor’s account of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic
notions of the uninhabited and ‘sublime wilderness’, Bender argues that
the idea of ‘the wilderness continues to manifest not sublimity but the
work of a transcendent order in which America’s expansion is justified
and sanctified’ (Bender, 2008). The justification of settler expansion
in North America – the production of the rural and the urban – was
achieved partly by comprehending the land and the people as unset-
tled and ‘wild’ and partly by government efforts to actively deem First
Nations land ‘unproductive’ when in Aboriginal hands (Klinger, 1995;
Carter, 1993; Waisberg and Holzkamm, 1993).
The language of wilderness, civilization, and the ‘unimproved’ funda-
ment prior to colonization were often invoked to justify the colonial
secular against the threat of the Indian Land Question. As an unat-
tributed article in the Prince Rupert Evening Empire put it in 1914, at
a particularly active point in the Nisga’a land claims movement, ‘The
view has been expressed that, in appraising the Indian title, if admitted
by the privy council, the government should go back to the time when
 Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular 185

the lands were a wilderness, when a wild people were found upon an
unimproved state; that the Indian title cannot improve with civilized
development – and that it were vain for the Indians to expect to be
compensated to the extent of basing the intrinsic value of the land upon
the activities of a white population; and that, therefore, there can be
no claim for deferred benefit from the crown’ (n.a., 1914). Or in other
words, the author considered it to be an impossible task to calculate the
value of the land now that the white people had transformed it from
wilderness to civilization.3 Turning the ‘fundament’ into urban centres,
farmland, and mines required acts of sociality, violence, and governance
undergirded by stories and laws that drew from both secular and spir-
itual authority (Lessard, Johnson, and Webber, 2011).

Missionary real estate

To demonstrate the varieties of spiritual authority drawn upon by the

colonial secular state to claim land, I turn now to brief examples from
the Northwest Coast region of Canada, where Anglican missionaries
first ventured in the nineteenth century as one wing of the British colo-
nization of a diversity of First Nations. Though many missionaries held
very stubborn attitudes as to the rightness of their cause, they did not
necessarily use explicit violence to effect their ends. The transcend-
ence underlying their fundamentalisms was filtered through recourse
to divine and state authority. Missionaries’ main tools to ‘convert’ the
Nisga’a and Tsimshian were forms of mediated communication: the
biblical tracts, school books, and liturgical texts that had long shaped
Christian subjects in domestic and foreign missions (Meyer, 1999;
Keane, 2007). But they also used the texts of geographical surveys, ‘real
estate’ deeds, and other documents to claim what they took to be the
fundament – the wilderness – in both state-sanctioned and ‘mythologi-
cally’ grounded ways. To adapt Benjamin Berger’s argument about how
Canadian law has both transcendent authority and a will to convert
at its core, missionaries were very aware of how the Bible and the law
were powerful and complementary tools for their own task of conver-
sion (Berger, 2010).
Anglican missionary James Benjamin McCullagh (1854–1921) well
understood that competing mentalities and practices of claiming land
were at the heart of conflicts between Nisga’a and colonial secular
Christianity. McCullagh was a missionary based in Aiyansh, a small
Christian settlement on the Nass River, within what the Anglican
Church called the Diocese of Caledonia. In an address entitled ‘The
186 Pamela Klassen

Indian Potlatch’ that he gave to the Church Missionary Society at the

Anglican mission village of Metlakatla in 1899, McCullagh provided a
detailed ethnographic account of the Nisga’a feasting system, worthy
of any anthropologist of his day. Clarifying that ‘potlatch’ was a term
invented by the ‘white man’ that conflated a variety of different feast
systems, McCullagh argued that the potlatch was not primarily a reli-
gious event but a political act: ‘the systematized form of tribal govern-
ment based upon the united suffrages of the clans’ (McCullagh, 1899: 2).
The potlatch, McCullagh claimed, was the Nisga’a form of an election.
Though Nisga’a leaders contemporary to McCullagh used a similar
kind of argument to argue for their land claims, McCullagh used his
insights about the potlatch to argue for its eradication as a public form
of governance that was at once ‘socialistic’ and selfish (McCullagh, 1899:
5). He also listed other ‘negative’ effects that anti-potlatch critics usually
named, such as the potlatch being a waste of economically produc-
tive time and an opportunity for social and sexual licence (Cole and
Chaikin, 1990; Bracken, 1997). But the government’s 1885 ban of the
potlatch was an ineffective legal approach, argued McCullagh. Instead,
he pleaded for a law that would protect the ‘Christian Indians’ who had
tried to step out of the potlatch system of social and economic debts.
It was the potlatch system, McCullagh argued, that kept drawing his
Christian converts back to traditional Nisga’a practices. The government
should draw up a new law, he advised, ensuring that ‘a chief wishing to
become Christian and civilized should have his rights assured to him by
law – the Potlatch should not be allowed to deprive him of his rights’
(McCullagh, 1899: 19). McCullagh was referring here to rights of terri-
tory and inheritance, and he understood a conversion to Christianity to
entail that a Nisga’a Christian would give up feasting as an inappropri-
ately ritualized way to claim or redistribute land.
Ritual and territory, in fact, were profoundly linked in both Nisga’a
and Christian social imaginaries. To participate in a Nisga’a feast was
to acknowledge the host’s legitimate right to territory and authority as
the leader of a clan or house; to become a Christian was to renounce
that authority and to claim territory under the laws of the state as an
individual. To adapt Charles Taylor’s terms, to become a Christian was to
become a buffered self enclosed in the love of Jesus Christ, who would
ideally be able to own real estate in his (and rarely her) own name.
Reconceptualizing land as real estate was central to missionary labours
throughout the Northwest Coast. Under law, Indians could not pre-empt
land or vote – two defining features of secular citizenship (Harris, 2002:
89). They could only own land collectively, in the form of ‘reserves’, and
 Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular 187

even that ownership could be threatened if the population of the reserve

dwindled (Sterritt, 1998). With different emphases, both the Nisga’a and
the missionaries contested this law, arguing that the right to own land
would allow Indians to become full-fledged citizens. The Nisga’a, along
with some missionaries, insisted that their collective land claims must
first be settled before they would seek to own real estate as individuals (cf.
McNally, 2010). First Nations were therefore stuck between two mentali-
ties of real estate: to own land individually would weaken their collec-
tive land claims and the larger challenge to Canadian sovereignty that
these claims embodied, while working within the reserve system forced
them to conceive of and inhabit their land under this same Canadian
sovereignty. Real estate had, in this case, very real effects.
At the same time that missionaries argued for individual landholding
for Indians, they recognized the importance of collective landholding
when it came to the Church. In an illuminating exchange of letters
with a law firm in the provincial capital of Victoria, the Bishop of
the Diocese of Caledonia, Frederick Du Vernet (1860–1924), argued
repeatedly for the special privilege of the Church to own land as a
‘corporate’ or collective body, and even, in some cases, to do so on
Indian reserves. In one dispute over land in the small river settlement
of Port Simpson, Du Vernet challenged the claim of the previous
Bishop of Caledonia, William Ridley, that he owned a small parcel of
land privately, instead of as the representative of the Church. In Du
Vernet’s eyes, Ridley was confusing his roles as a church official and a
private citizen (Du Vernet, 1909).
When Ridley tried to sell some of this land, Du Vernet argued that
Bishop Ridley did not understand that he only ‘owned’ Church land
as a common resource vested in him as long as he held the ‘name’ of
bishop: ‘It seems to me so highly improbable that Bishop Ridley in the
days of his full mental vigor should have allowed his private property to
be registered in the name of “The Lord Bishop of Caledonia” knowing
as he did that such was a “corporation sole” that in the interests of the
Church I must ask for further proof before I hand over Church prop-
erty’ (Du Vernet, 1909). The corporation sole had long been ‘a curious
freak of English law’, as a concept that would help with maintaining the
continuity of church property by designating an ecclesiastically sanc-
tioned individual as holding the ‘fee simple’ or title to a piece of church
land not as a ‘person’ but as legal entity (Maitland, 1901: 131; Maitland,
1900; O’Hara, 1988). Most commonly, for example, a bishop would own
church property as cleric, who was a man but was also the ‘secular, legal
embodiment of the church’ (Maitland, 1900, 1901; O’Hara, 1988). As
188 Pamela Klassen

Perry Dane has argued, the corporation sole was an individual who was
a collective representation, poised at the juncture of secular and church
power as an ‘extraordinary, irregular, custom-tailored effort at trans-
lating religious principles into secular terms’ (Dane, 1998: 58).
In a manner ironically parallel to the way that Nisga’a territorial claims
were ascribed to a ritually sanctioned individual holding the authority
of a name through the potlatch or feasting system, the Canadian state
recognized that an Anglican Bishop owned collective land as an indi-
vidual sanctioned by appropriate ritual justification. The state could
find a custom-tailored solution for Christian communal landholding via
a name rooted in divine transcendence, but it could not accommodate
comparable Nisga’a modes (McNeil, 2007: 141). This is an illuminating
example of the fundamental Christianity of what legal scholar Marianna
Valverde has called the ‘epistemology of sovereignty’ (Valverde, 2011).
With the transcendent authority and honour of the ‘Crown’ in play, the
Canadian juridico-political system grounds itself in ‘the doctrine that
the Crown is always already honourable, with this honour then seeping
into the crown’s ‘mystical body’ – the Canadian state, in this instance –
just as Christ’s virtues are deemed to seep into the mystical corpora-
tion that is the Christian church’ (Valverde, 2011: 957).4 Or as Andrew
Mercer put it in 1911, judges and justices of the peace ‘used [the] Bible
for to do right’ (Mercer, 1911).
Anglican missionaries should not be seen only as pious land grabbers.
Some among them mounted some of the most dogged and innovative
legal campaigns for Indian land claims in the early twentieth century
(Foster, 2007). At the same time, they worked with a mentality of real
estate that understood individual landholding to be both a civic and a
spiritual virtue. They reiterated this virtue through testimonies, rituals,
and deeds of title; they remade the fundament through both story and
law, with both secular and spiritual reasons.

Conclusion

The nation-state (and the public sphere) within which First Nations,
missionaries, and government officials were operating at the beginning
of the twentieth century was already postsecular, if by that we mean
a context in which communities with diverse mentalities, myths, and
practices are (unequally) compelled to communicate and contend
within the secular norms of liberal democratic polities. The European
and Canadian settlers who followed the railroads, timber, and mines
to northwestern British Columbia in the early twentieth century were
 Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular 189

relatively comfortable with securing their territory with cash and deeds
of title. For the Nisga’a and the Tsimshian who greeted Christian (and
‘unchurched’) visitors to their Pacific Northwest homelands with a
mixture of hospitality and hostility, the secular norms of communi-
cation – whether Christian testimony, newspapers, deeds of land, or
school curricula – were literally written both in a foreign language and
in a foreign mentality. Not always working in harmony with colonial
officials, Christian missionaries in the new nation of Canada tried to
abolish certain religious mentalities and practices among First Nations
while instantiating others, as they sought to create secular, Christian
citizens who could own land, build schools and churches, learn to read,
and ‘lay claim to the rights of men’.
Working with mentality of real estate, missionaries, settlers, and
colonial officials did not comprehend their property regime as a
fundamentality. Derrida’s reflection on hospitality in a ‘time of
terror’ prompted him to question the ‘philosophical heritage’ and
criteria that enable comprehension and justification; reflecting on
more mundane ‘events’ in the more distant past can have similar
effects. Communication and comprehension are themselves so deeply
cultural that, in the end, we likely all have something of the unex-
amined fundamentalist in our demeanors and our expectations. As
a concept to think with, I would hope that the ‘postsecular’ could
help to imagine and reimagine the clash and mixture of mentalities
and practices – new and old – that give shape to the present. In the
process, it is important to be mindful of one’s own fundamentalities –
those mentalities with rigid borders that may often be more like invis-
ible fences than brick walls – and think carefully and honestly about
what to retain and what to deconstruct.
In that spirit, Charles Taylor’s magisterial account of the ‘secular
age’ may have given short shrift to the place of colonialism in the
creation of the secular. In other work on the ‘politics of recogni-
tion’, however, he has directly confronted issues of First Nations
political authority. Commenting on the Nisga’a treaty in 1998, Taylor
eloquently defended a vision of Canadian jurisprudence that would
work to negotiate ‘Aboriginal self-rule’ with explicit acknowledgement
of Canada’s responsibility for the long and destructive history of colo-
nialism (Taylor, 1998). His later reflections on the secular, however,
did not bring these insights to bear on the ways that state sovereignty,
working in concert with Christian authority, was a ‘creative’ process of
destruction. To me, this suggests that any analysis of the secular that
cuts too sharp a distinction between immanence and transcendence,
190 Pamela Klassen

or the earthly and the ethereal, misses the ways that secular authority –
even in the form of real estate – depends on the infusion of matter and
spirit.
The sovereignty of the Canadian state is not going away any time
soon, but the assumptions that undergird it have been subject to some
remarkably ‘deconstructive’ thinking of late. Canadian Supreme Court
justices and legal theorists have come very close to acknowledging how
the mentality of real estate and property operates as a fundamentality,
underwritten by the coercive authority of the state, due in large part
to First Nations’ land claims including the cases that led to the Nisga’a
of the Nass River becoming the Nisga’a Nation in 2000. Qualifying the
state’s sovereignty as de facto and acknowledging the sovereignty of First
Nations, some Canadian legal thinkers (including some justices) are
also acknowledging that the fundamentals of Canadian sovereignty are
not necessarily rooted in time immemorial but are subject to ‘secular’
change, however slow and painful (Slattery, 2005). This change is
unpredictable; within the last few years, real estate has made its way
to the Nisga’a Nation. In a controversial decision, Nisga’a are now able
to hold some fee simple land as individuals, and to sell their land to
the highest bidder, whether those bidders are Nisga’a or not (Gutnick,
2012). Andrew Mercer and J.B. McCullagh both argued for this ‘right’,
but at this moment, it is hard to say if the real estate signs that now
dot the Nass Valley are markers of postsecular emancipation, colonial
secular victory, or something else altogether.

Notes
For their comments on this paper, I thank the editors, Benjamin Berger, and the
participants in Postsecular Publics, a collaborative workshop organized by the
Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto and the Centre for
Humanities at Utrecht University.
1. For the most part, I use the term ‘First Nations’ to denote Aboriginal peoples in
the land settled as Canada but also use the term ‘Indian’ when it would have
been the term used in early twentieth-century missionary and legal contexts.
2. Taylor, however, is no champion of the ‘immanent frame’ of the secular, and
what he considers to be its corresponding humanist, therapeutic ‘mentality’
wreaking dangerous effects on human dignity and flourishing (Taylor, 2007).
3. This quotation is attributed to Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs
Duncan Campbell Scott in Harris (2002).
4. Valverde is drawing both from John Borrows’s discussion of the ‘alchemy of
sovereignty’ and from Kantorowicz’s discussion of medieval Christian ‘polit-
ical theology’ (Borrows, 1999; Kantorowicz, 1997).
 Mentality, Fundamentality, and the Colonial Secular 191

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10
Religious Aspirations, Public
Religion, and the Secularity of
Pluralism
Patrick Eisenlohr

The salience of religious activism and mobilizations throughout the

contemporary world is perhaps the main reason for the popularity of
the notion of the postsecular. The latter is inspired by hopes for greater
inclusiveness towards religious groups and their aspirations, realizing
that they are not necessarily incompatible with emancipatory political
agendas, as well as the insight that religion remains a key component
of social and political life that no amount of modernizing ‘progress’
and expansion of scientific knowledge can make disappear. At the same
time, the term also owes much of its currency to the assumption that
religion had actually been pushed back by modernization processes but
has now ‘returned.’ However, an array of scholarship has demonstrated
that religion actually never went away but was powerfully transformed
by European imperial expansion and the rise of the nation state (Asad,
2003; Masuzawa, 2005; van der Veer, 2001). To make matters more
complex, it is now increasingly clear that the modern comparative cate-
gory of ‘religion’ that provides the basis for any discussion of seculariza-
tion is actually the product of the same modernization processes that
until relatively recently were widely believed to be responsible for an
assumed decline of religion. Modern practices of governmentality delin-
eated religion as a sphere of life separate from politics, law, economy,
science, and society, and, as such, the universal category of religion is
co-constituted through what is frequently regarded as its binary oppo-
site, the secular. The concept of the postsecular, thus, evokes a rather
contradictory scenario. On one hand, it is indebted to the classical
secularization thesis according to which privatization of religion, the
separation of religion from other aspects of social and political life, and

195
196 Patrick Eisenlohr

the decline of the social significance of religion necessarily go hand in

hand (see Casanova, 1994). Since, from a global perspective, no decline
of the social significance of religion or increased privatization of reli-
gion appears to have taken place – indeed many argue the opposite –
this invites the assumption that our contemporary world has somehow
moved beyond the secular in a comprehensive sense. On the other hand,
our comparative concept of religion which seems so fundamental to the
current discussion about a religious ‘revival’ and a decline of the secular
is actually unthinkable without the conceptual and governmental oper-
ations separating the religious from the nonreligious that constitute
such a key part of the secularization thesis. One also has to add that
European imperial expansion as a further key dimension of modernity
and the resulting colonial encounter with religious others also helped
bring about the universal and comparative category of religion that is
often taken for granted in discussions about the putative retreat of the
secular (van der Veer, 2001).
Perhaps the two most prominent theorists of the secular, Charles
Taylor and Talal Asad, have both argued in different ways that certain
aspects of the secular remain fundamental to our social and cultural
life and are fully compatible with the instances of heightened reli-
gious activism and the visibility of religious practices and identifica-
tions so widely observed today. Locating the origin of the secular in the
dynamics of Christian thought and politics, Taylor argues that people
in Western societies and also large numbers elsewhere now live in an
irretrievably ‘secular age’. This is because, for them, even though not
having declined in significance, religion has become an option only,
requiring justification (Taylor, 2007: 3). Taylor argues that from such
a perspective an immanent world has become the ‘natural’ baseline of
our existence, which does not necessarily deny the existence of the tran-
scendent or preclude engagement with it, but constitutes such a self-
sufficient ‘immanent frame’ that it does not require the transcendent
any more to appear as self-evident and real (Taylor, 2007: 549, 2010:
306–307). Taylor, thus, maintains that secularization in a very specific
sense has become irreversible for a large and growing part of humanity.
At the same time, the contemporary world is subject to dramatically
visible ‘religious mobilizations’ (Taylor, 2006), which rely on the same
modern techniques of moving and mobilizing people that are also used
in nation-building, as well as on the same media-based interventions in
the public sphere that democratic politics, advertising, and entertain-
ment also make use of. According to Taylor, people need to be mobilized
precisely because religion is not taken for granted any more and because
 Religious Aspirations, Public Religion, Secularity of Pluralism 197

they live in a world that from a phenomenological point of view does

not require religion to be experienced as real and meaningful. Therefore,
this ‘disenchanted’ condition and highly salient religious activism as
well as a growing social significance of religion in much of the world
seem perfectly compatible.
Taking a very different perspective on the genealogy of the secular,
Talal Asad nevertheless reaches similar conclusions about the co-presence
of the deeply secular and highly salient religious activism and mobiliza-
tion today. As with Taylor, Asad suggests that our contemporary world
is profoundly secular in a very specific way. Instead of emphasizing the
role of a cosmological ‘disenchantment’ of the world that makes the
transcendent an option only, for Asad the role of the modern nation-
state is crucial in the secularization of certain aspects of our lives. Not
only does the nation-state stand for the doctrine of popular sovereignty
and is thus in contrast to the divinely legitimized rule of dynastic states
firmly rooted in the history of humans – for ‘the men and women of
each national society make and own their history’ (Asad, 1999: 186) –
but it also seeks to regulate and remake individual life in the fulfilment
of its own practical goals of governance and not those related to any sort
of divine or transcendent agency. The modern nation-state, thus, aims
to shape all social identities and spheres of action. ‘It is not only that
the state intervenes directly in the social body for purposes of reform; it
is that all social activity requires the consent of the law, and therefore
of the nation-state’ (Asad, 1999: 191). This fundamental condition of
modernity can certainly coexist with what Taylor has called ‘religious
mobilizations’, in which the social significance and visibility of religion
increases and religious activists forcefully participate in public spheres.
It is only that religious activists such as Islamists have to contend with
the regulatory powers of the modern nation-state that constitutes the
secular ground for the management of the social: ‘No movement that
aspires to more than mere belief or inconsequential talk in public can
remain indifferent to state power in a secular world’ (Asad, 1999: 191).
However, what does such ‘not remaining indifferent’ to state power
entail for religious activists and movements? How do the regulatory
powers of the modern state grounded in a secular vision of social life
intersect with what Taylor has called ‘religious mobilizations’? In this
chapter, I address these questions in order to contribute to a better
understanding of how dimensions of ‘deep secularity’ that have become
a taken-for-granted baseline for the political regulation of social and
cultural life throughout the world relate to what is widely understood
to be a greater visibility and importance of religion in the world today.
198 Patrick Eisenlohr

I examine two cases of religious mobilization among Muslims in

contemporary Mauritius and in the global megacity Mumbai. Certainly,
my examples could be added to many others confirming the salience of
religious identifications and practices in the contemporary world. But
my point is not to reiterate that such examples demonstrate the failure
of the secularization thesis. Rather, I want to draw attention to the
complex interplay between such religious mobilizations and the secular
dimensions of modern nation-states.

Religion and globalization

One explanation for the greater salience of religious mobilizations in the

contemporary world that is increasingly being put forward is the link
between processes of globalization and religion. There is, for example,
an established point of view that interprets religious activism, such as
the growth of so-called fundamentalism, as a stress symptom among
people suffering from the disruptions and insecurities brought about
by globalization. Unable to make sense of the new complexities and
dislocations that globalization brings along, they resort to purified and
maximized forms of religion in a reactive way (Roy, 2004). Also, the
workings of global markets often appear opaque to people in their local
contexts and therefore, one argument goes, their effects are interpreted
through a religious lens, resulting in ‘occult economies’ involving, for
example, the agency of witches and sorcerers (Comaroff and Comaroff,
1999). More recent work in anthropology, however, has sought to avoid
analysing the links between religion and globalization by reducing
religion to the manifestation of something else (see Rudnyckyj, 2009).
On the contrary, returning to a more Weberian approach to religion
and political economy, scholars are now investigating the role religious
cosmologies play in shaping the global political economy and examine
the religious undertones in discourses about globalization.
For example, Joel Robbins (2009) and Thomas Csordas (2009)
have recently argued that there are deep resonances between the
centre-periphery structures of the globalized world and the cosmologies
of major religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam that rest on
a sharp distinction between this world and a realm of the transcendent.
Many, perhaps most, people in the contemporary world view themselves
as inhabiting peripheries of the globalized world, wanting to reach the
desired centres. Religious cosmologies that reject this world in favour of
travelling to a realm of a radically different and superior sphere of the
transcendent structurally echo this contrast between real places that are
 Religious Aspirations, Public Religion, Secularity of Pluralism 199

lacking and the desired centres of the global political economy. Religious
traditions built on such a contrast, such as Evangelical Christianity
and reformist forms of Islam, provide people on the peripheries with
workable plans to reach a desired realm so different from their present
circumstances, and this is also the reason why they thrive and spread
in the contemporary world. Among Sunni Barelvi Muslims in Mauritius
and Twelver Shiite Muslims in Mumbai, where I have conducted ethno-
graphic field research since 1996 and 2005, respectively, I have found
evidence for such a link between religious activism and the dynamics
of globalization. It is tempting to apply such an analysis to these two
places, as Mumbai is one of the world’s global megacities, and Mauritius
an Indian Ocean island without a precolonial population that was settled
in the course of European imperial expansion and has never known
anything but globalization. Many Shiite Muslims in Mumbai as well as
Sunni Barelvi Muslims in Mauritius consider involvement in religious
activism and orthodoxy as a hallmark of a modern, cosmopolitan life-
style, connecting them not only to the transcendent but also to centres
of global importance in this world. In Mauritius, Muslims constitute 17
per cent of the population of approximately 1.2 million, the percentage
of Hindus is now 52 per cent, while people of Indian origin taken as a
whole constitute almost 70 per cent of the population. Among Mauritian
Muslims, I have documented a steady trend towards standardized ortho-
doxy in the course of the last 100 years mainly driven by transnational
Gujarati trader communities (Eisenlohr, 2012). This trend has greatly
increased following the heightened integration of Mauritius into neolib-
eral processes of globalization since the 1980s having brought about
what many consider an ‘economic miracle’. Muslims constitute roughly
20 per cent of Mumbai’s population, while Twelver Shiite Muslims
comprise by far the largest number among the Shiite minority within the
Muslim population.1 Ithna Ashari Khojas, a Gujarati trader community,
and the ‘Mughals’, a business community of Iranian origin, dominate
the elites among Twelver Shiites and also most religious organizations.
However, the great majority of Twelver Shiites in Mumbai is of North
Indian migrant origin, and poverty among them is very widespread. In
Mumbai, the growth of religious activism among Shiite Muslims has
gone hand in hand with large flows of migration from the rural and
small-town peripheries of Northern India to the global megacity. Here,
migration that has been directly motivated by the role of Mumbai as a
global centre has also led to increased engagement with the transna-
tional networks of Twelver Shiite orthodoxy, especially the networks
of widely respected senior scholars known as marja-e taqlid (sources of
200 Patrick Eisenlohr

emulation) such as Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf. At the same time, such

growth of religious orthodoxy also increasingly shapes the relationships
Shiite Muslims entertain to their places of origin or ancestry in Northern
India. Monetary remittances do of course play a key role in this relation-
ship, as family members and other extended kin often depend on such
remittances from migrants in the megacity. However, some of these
resources are now also spent on religious activities and the building and
support of Shiite institutions and places of religious remembrance such
as miniature replicas of the tombs of Hussain and other members of
the ahl al-bayt (the family of the Prophet) who lost their lives in the
battle of Karbala in 680 AD. Moreover, migrants and their Mumbai-born
descendants frequently time their periodic return visits from the city to
coincide with religiously significant events in the ritual calendar, such
as the months of Muharram and Ramadan. Also, religious mobilization
among Muslims in both Mauritius and Mumbai to a considerable extent
unfolds through the media technological and transport infrastructures
of globalization. In both places, religious traditions are now firmly inte-
grated with contemporary media practices. Sermons and devotional
poetry recitals circulate transnationally and provide more opportunities
for honing one’s piety also outside the established ritual and performa-
tive contexts associated with these religious genres. Moreover, media
strategies adopted from modern marketing and advertising now feature
prominently in promoting particular traditions of Islam, such as the
South Asian Sunni Barelvi tradition in Mauritius or Twelver Shiism in
Mumbai.

State regulation of religious diversity

All these developments illustrate the broad links between processes of

globalization and religious activism in the contemporary world. But it is
also important to realize that such activism has to reckon with the regu-
latory powers of the modern nation-state. Such engagement with state
power remains also central to other kinds of social activism. However,
the boundary between religious and nonreligious movements of protest
and affirmation is especially fleeting today, as the example of contempo-
rary feminism attests (Braidotti, 2008). Both in Mauritius and India, the
managing of religious diversity is subject to state controls and visions of
pluralism, and religious mobilizations are also, in part, a response to such
national regimes of diversity. One important dimension of the secularity
of these modern nation-states is that their institutions regard certain
relationships between religious institutions and traditions and the state
 Religious Aspirations, Public Religion, Secularity of Pluralism 201

as desirable, because they consider these relationships as essential for the

maintenance of public order and the formation of loyal and productive
citizens. Among both Barelvi Muslims in Mauritius and Twelver Shiite
Muslims in Mumbai there is a pronounced tendency to combine reli-
gious activism with pledges to good citizenship and, above all, to stress
the role Islamic piety can play in promoting peaceful coexistence among
citizens. There is a great concern to display the conformity of religious
mobilization with the ideal arrangements of religious pluralism promul-
gated by the respective nation-states. In Mauritius, where there was no
precolonial population, the postcolonial state has embarked on a policy
to promote so-called ‘ancestral cultures’ of the various ‘communities’ of
Indian and Chinese origin, that in turn largely consist of religious tradi-
tions. The dominant ideology of Mauritian pluralism suggests that full
citizenship involves the cultivation of such ‘ancestral cultures’ with reli-
gious biases and turns Mauritians into morally grounded and produc-
tive citizens capable to peacefully coexist with others. For Mauritian
Muslims, Islamic traditions represent their ‘ancestral culture’ which the
state supports by subsidizing religious bodies and institutions and by
teaching so-called ‘ancestral languages’ such as Urdu and Arabic in state
schools – languages that Muslims almost exclusively use in religious
contexts and settings. By cultivating Islam as their ‘ancestral culture’,
Mauritian Muslims not only reinforce transnational links and solidari-
ties and establish connections to centres of religious authority located
elsewhere but also demonstrate their adherence to the Mauritian state
vision of governing the marked diversity of the Mauritian population.
Ministers and other senior state representatives attend major events in
the Islamic ritual calendar such as yaum-un nabi (the birthday of the
Prophet), where Muslims combine public displays of piety with a claim
to be model citizens whose grounding in a major, recognized, religious
tradition enables them to peacefully and respectfully coexist with non-
Muslim citizens as a matter of ethical conduct.
This is also the case in Mumbai, where public expressions of Islamic
practice and belonging are constrained by the status of Muslims as a
beleaguered minority in India that is constantly asked to prove their
good citizenship and routinely suspected of involvement in subversive
activities such as terrorism and collaboration with archenemy Pakistan.
At the same time, postcolonial India has followed politics of pluralism
and secularism that recognize the great importance of religion in the
lives of Indian citizens, including its collective dimensions. Discourses
that connect moral values grounded in religious tradition, good citizen-
ship, and peaceful coexistence are very widespread in India. Responding
202 Patrick Eisenlohr

to this special and problematic position within the regime of religious

pluralism promoted by the Indian state, a Shiite Muslim media centre
in Mumbai affiliated with Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf, annually launches
a ‘Muharram Awareness Campaign’ in the Islamic month of Muharram.
This month is a time of ritual mourning for Shiite Muslims who
commemorate the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussain
and other members of the family of the Prophet in the Battle of Karbala.
Through its website, as well as advertising banners on buses and trains
and in other public places, the ‘World Islamic Network’ headquartered in
the centrally located Mumbai Muslim neighbourhood of Dongri, seeks
to connect Islamic piety with the claim that Muslims are exemplary
Indian citizens. For example, many Shiite Muslims consider Gandhi’s
anti-colonial struggle as being inspired by Hussain’s struggle against
tyranny at Karbala. The billboards set up by the network feature reported
sayings by Gandhi according to which, ‘If India ever desires to become
a great nation it should follow the example of Imam Hussain.’ Also, the
Muharram 2010/2011 campaign made reference to the 26 November
2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai by portraying Shiite Muslims as model
citizens who, through the tragedy of Karbala, represent the world’s orig-
inal victims of terrorism. For example, on World Islamic Network adver-
tising banner images of the iconic Taj Mahal hotel, as it burned during
the attacks, were juxtaposed with images of the golden minarets of the
splendid tomb of Imam Hussain at Karbala, together with the statement:
‘The Grandson of the Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w.s.) Imam Hussain (a.s.)
sacrificed his life to unite all who oppose terrorism and injustice.’ Such a
combination of promoting Muslim piety during the month of Ramadan
with raising awareness of Indian Muslims’ good citizenship and moral
grounding among non-Muslims was not only evident from the place-
ment of the billboards and digital banners outside Muslim enclaves but
also through the choice of English and Hindi – the latter especially indi-
cates the addressing of a national but clearly non-Muslim public.
Both examples demonstrate that modern religious mobilizations are
intensely driven by the forces of globalization while making ample use
of its media infrastructures. In this, they not only respond to but are
also crucially shaped by the regulations and ideologies of governing
religion in the respective nation-states. Both Muslims in Mauritius and
in Mumbai cannot ignore state visions of religious diversity and the
relationships between state institutions and religious groups they stipu-
late. Indeed, especially in the media-driven parts of religious mobiliza-
tion, both Barelvi Muslims in Mauritius and Twelver Shiite Muslims in
Mumbai seek to align themselves with such official ideals of diversity.
 Religious Aspirations, Public Religion, Secularity of Pluralism 203

In different ways, they combine calls for Islamic piety and orthopraxy
with claims to be good citizens that contribute to national cohesion and
are engaged in tolerant and fruitful coexistence with citizens of other
religious affiliation. This in turn indicates that the religious activism,
among Barelvi Muslims in Mauritius and Shiite Muslims in Mumbai I
have described, intersects in complex ways with techniques of modern
governance that constitute a key dimension of secularity in the contem-
porary world.

Standardized religion

Religious mobilizations among Muslims in Mauritius and Mumbai

clearly respond to state regimes of regulating religious diversity among
its citizens. But this is not the only way in which highly visible piety and
religious activism interacts with what authors such as Talal Asad have
described as the core secular dimensions of our contemporary world. Let
us return to the issue of the modern, universal concept of religion that
is the combined result of modern practices of governance separating a
sphere of the religious from other fields of social and political life and
the intensified encounter with religious others in the course of European
imperial expansion. Perhaps no other issue illustrates the deep entangle-
ment of religious mobilization and dimensions of the secular as force-
fully than the important role that standardized, universal notions of
religion play in what appears to some as a contemporary ‘return of reli-
gion.’ In my Mauritian example, the centrality of standardized religion
is already obvious in the official policy of promoting ‘ancestral cultures’
largely based on officially recognized religious traditions. Mauritians are
thus expected not to adhere to popular religious traditions and hetero-
doxy but to officially recognize ‘world religions’, and this adherence, in
turn, reinforces their membership in the nation. For Mauritian Muslims,
major Islamic traditions represent their ‘ancestral culture’, and the
South Asian Barelvi school is currently still the most significant of these
transnational, standardized forms of religion. The Mauritian policy of
privileging ‘ancestral cultures’ based on such religious orthodoxies is the
endpoint of a long history of religious debate and purification among
Mauritians. For Muslims, who – like Mauritian Muslims in their great
majority – came to Mauritius as indentured labourers, this has resulted in
the decline of forms of popular and ‘hybrid’ religiosity that were charac-
teristic of Hindus and Muslims of rural nineteenth-century North India,
and especially the shared world of the sugar plantations and emerging
Indo-Mauritian villages in the countryside. There, forms of neighbourly
204 Patrick Eisenlohr

solidarity between indentured immigrants of Hindu and Muslim back-

ground were the norm, and the shared memory of migration and its
circumstances was long kept alive through forms of ritual kinship across
religious lines among those of whose ancestors had arrived on the same
ship (jahaji bhai). Such shared Indo-Mauritian life-worlds, under inden-
ture and in its immediate aftermath, also included forms of reciprocal
participation in religious practices. It was common for Hindus to partici-
pate in the ‘Ghoon’ or ‘Tazzia’, processions in memory of the martyrdom
of Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad at the Battle of
Karbala (Edun, 1984). My older informants in Mauritius remembered
that Muslims, in turn, joined in the chanting of the popular version of
the Ramayana epos on ritual occasions and also left offerings such as
flowers and candles at village trees for local guardian deities. Muslim and
Hindu wedding rituals were more influenced by the shared rural back-
ground of indentured labourers in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar than by
separate religious orthodoxies. In the course of the twentieth century,
and greatly accelerating in the decades before independence in 1968,
this shared world of popular and alternative religiosity came gradually
to an end and was increasingly replaced by religious purification and
the accentuation of boundaries with religious others. Among Mauritian
Muslims, Gujarati merchant elites, who had settled in Mauritius as free
immigrants with their own capital and dense networks of business,
kinship, and religion with India and other locations in the Indian Ocean
world, played a key role in spreading more standardized and orthodox
forms of Islam among Mauritian Muslims. The Kutchi Memons, for a
long time the wealthiest and most influential among these merchant
elites, introduced the Barelvi tradition to Mauritius, to which they culti-
vate a longstanding relationship. The Memons’ chief competitors, the
Sunni Surtees, also engaged in mosque building and invited mission-
aries of the rival Deobandi tradition to Mauritius. Barelvis, for a long
time the large majority, probably still constitute little more than half
among the Mauritian Muslims. Their influence is steadily pushed back
by the Deobandis, above all the transnational missionary movement
Tablighi Jamaat, while there is also a growing number of Salafis. The
competition between rival Islamic traditions in Mauritius introduced
through the cosmopolitan networks of Gujarati merchant communities
led to a growing trend towards standardized, orthodox versions of Islam
which were in turn recognized as Mauritian Muslims’ ‘ancestral culture’
after independence in 1968 (Eisenlohr, 2006a).
The deployment of standardized religious orthodoxies in seeking to
achieve peaceful coexistence among citizens is another salient example
 Religious Aspirations, Public Religion, Secularity of Pluralism 205

of how highly visible religious mobilization and secular forms of

governance intermingle. Both in Mauritius and in India there are strong
traditions assigning religious orthodoxies key roles in the formation of
peaceful, tolerant, and productive citizens. According to these visions,
citizens are in need of moral grounding to be able to acquire these
qualities, and the moral values citizens should adhere to are, in turn,
inseparable from religious traditions. Even though religious values and
practices play key roles in this vision of productive and tolerant citizen-
ship, they are also part of a secular regime of modern governance. This
is because the state promotes such religiously undergirded notions of
citizenship not in the name of a realm of the divine. The state does so
in order to create more compliant and productive citizens who will, in
turn, support and strengthen its own power. Crucially, both in Mauritius
and India the modern nation-state legitimizes its role in claiming to be
the concrete realization of the right of self-determination of the nation,
which in turn does not belong to the world of the divine.
In Mauritius, the state draws on a discourse of the possible destabi-
lization of social bonds brought about by economic development in
the context of globalization. Mobilizing a familiar narrative of globali-
zation as potentially disruptive and destabilizing on the local level,
the state legitimizes its broad support for ‘ancestral cultures’ based
on religious traditions in terms of the latter’s presumed integrative
effects. Here, Mauritian state representatives partake in a particular
Gandhian tradition of regulating religious diversity in India according
to which religious commitments are essential building blocks for
shaping disciplined and peaceful citizens (Parsuraman, 1988; see also
Eisenlohr, 2006b: 398–399). Far from banishing religion to a sphere of
the private, the task of the state is actually to encourage and mobilize
benign religious values across the boundaries of religious traditions
to make successful nation building possible (compare Nandy, 1990;
Madan, 1998). This take on Indian secularism, so eagerly adopted by
the Mauritian government, contrasts with the vision of India’s first
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was convinced of the necessity
for the state to control dangerous religious passions. However, Nehru’s
understanding of secularism, certainly the most influential among
the range of Indian secularisms since independence, did not insist
on a strict separation of state from religious institutions. Recognizing
religious rights also in their collective dimension, Nehru allowed
for the state to intervene in the affairs of religious communities to
reform or ban ‘backward’ practices, amounting to an arrangement of
the relations between the state and religious communities described
206 Patrick Eisenlohr

as ‘principled distance’ (Bhargava, 2007). Both dominant strains of

Indian secularism, Nehruvian and Gandhian, are projects to regu-
late religious diversity through the state. This is also the case in the
Gandhian vision. Even though the latter contains romantic appeals to
presumably unsullied and benign popular religiosity rooted in an old
Indian tradition of religious conviviality and tolerance, the mobiliza-
tion of religion for the making of good citizens ultimately turns out to
be also a modern technique of governance, a point especially salient
in the Mauritian policy of regulating diversity through the promotion
of ‘ancestral cultures’. But also in Mumbai, Shiite Muslims’ portrayal
of themselves as the world’s original victims of injustice and terrorism,
supporting their public claims to be good and peaceful Indian citi-
zens, is taking place against the background of increasing standardiza-
tion of religion. Since the late 1970s, for Shiite Muslims in Mumbai
this has, above all, been evident in the much greater importance of
practices and doctrines that are explicitly authorized by leading reli-
gious scholars in the world of Twelver Shiism that are recognized
as marja-e taqlid. For Mumbai, this has meant a greater influence of
Ayatollah Sistanti in Najaf, Iraq, who is also the most influential marja
in India as a whole. The spread of contemporary religious media, such
as formerly cassettes and now audio and DVDs – as well as cable TV
networks that circulate various kinds of religious performances, such
as speeches and sermons of leading clerics, poetry recitals, and record-
ings of Shiite mourning practices for the victims of Karbala – has
played a key role in this process of increasing orthodoxization. Here,
the connection between state regimes of governing religious diversity
and the spread of standardized transnational religious orthodoxies
is less explicit than in the Mauritian policy of ‘ancestral cultures’.
Unlike in Mauritius, state institutions do not directly encourage the
increasing standardization of Islamic practice. Nevertheless, represent-
atives of transnational religious orthodoxy are also at the forefront
in positioning Shiite Muslims as good citizens, as in the ‘Muharram
Awareness Campaign’. One important reason for this is the change
from quietist stances connected to religious practices to more activist
engagement in Shiite religious mobilization, a development that many
of my informants attributed to the impact of the Iranian revolution.
While the concept of vilayat-e faqih (rule of the jurisprudent), insti-
tutionalized by Ayatollah Khomeini as the foundational principle of
the Islamic Republic of Iran, was never popular in India and was also
never approved by Ayatollah Sistani, the idea that remembrance of
the injustice of Karbala should not be confined to elaborate rituals of
 Religious Aspirations, Public Religion, Secularity of Pluralism 207

mourning but should also propel practical public engagement against

suffering and oppression has gained greater ground since the Iranian
Revolution throughout the transnational Shiite world. Among Shiite
Muslims in Mumbai this has, above all, resulted in increased charity
work and support of education among Shiite Muslims, as well as public
efforts in claiming good citizenship and loyalty to the Indian nation
on the basis of Islamic values. The foundations and activists tied to
transnational networks of marjaiyya have, in turn, dominated all these
forms of activism, at the same time greatly increasing their influence
among Shiite Muslims in Mumbai.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have engaged with the contradictions that underlie

the notion of the postsecular. I have suggested that those who consider
highly visible religious activism as evidence for a movement beyond a
secular world tend to ignore the crucial role that modern techniques of
governance play in the making of religion and religious mobilization in
the world today. My examples of religious vitality among Muslims in
Mumbai and Mauritius show that processes of globalization are impor-
tant driving forces for religious mobilization. They, however, intersect
with varying state regimes of regulating religion and religious plurality,
to which religious mobilizations respond. This dynamic results in greater
public visibility of religion and, at the same time, also gives secular forms
of modern governance ample opportunities to shape religious mobiliza-
tion. One of the original ironies of the notion of the postsecular is that
modern, standardized notions of religion that underlie discussions of a
possible transition to a postsecular world are themselves the product of
specific processes of secularization. My examples show that notions of
standardized ‘world religions’ have become increasingly important for
religious activism and state attempts to regulate religion. The spread of
such understandings of religion as major, transnational and standard-
ized orthodoxies can be understood as one of the dimensions of cultural
globalization. It is also the point where processes of globalization and
state regimes of regulating religion converge, both favouring major,
standardized forms of religion. The multilayered relationships between
processes of globalization, state regimes of regulating religion, and reli-
gious mobilization in the world today suggest a complex intermingling
of the religious and the secular that affords no easy answers about proc-
esses of secularization and puts in doubt expectations of an unambigu-
ously postsecular future.
208 Patrick Eisenlohr

Note
1. Ismaili Bohras and Ismaili Agha Khani Khojas are other, smaller Shiite commu-
nities in the city of Mumbai.

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Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago
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Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute Press.
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On Alterity and the Sacred in the Age of Globalization.’ In T. Csordas (ed.)
Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization, 55–72. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
 Religious Aspirations, Public Religion, Secularity of Pluralism 209

Roy, O. (2004). Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Rudnyckyj, D. (2009). ‘Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in
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—— (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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van der Veer, P. (2001). Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and
Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
11
Towards a More Inclusive
Feminism: Defining Feminism
through Faith
Eva Midden

Introduction

In 1991, the conservative liberal politician Frits Bolkestein published

the article ‘Integratie van minderheden moet met lef worden aangepakt’
(‘Integretation of minorities should be handled with guts’), which is
generally considered to be the start of a long range of debates about
minorities in the Netherlands. Even though many already believed
that more attention should be given to the integration of migrants,
the words of Bolkestein shocked the country (Prins, 2002). His main
thesis is that multiculturalism should be limited; Western principles
like freedom and equality are to be protected by all means (Bolkestein,
1991). Furthermore, he argues that more attention should be paid to the
integration of minorities: because it is such a difficult problem, we have
to deal with it with courage and creativity. There is no room for taboos
or taking the easy way out (Bolkestein, 1991: 188).
Despite the long history of immigration, which was closely linked to
colonization, most accounts of Dutch migration history start with the
arrival of the so-called ‘guest workers’ in the 1950s (Ghorashi, 2003).
They, mostly from Turkey and Morocco, were seen as temporary migrants
who came to the Netherlands to work for a few years. When the govern-
ment realized that these people would not go back to their country of
birth, integration policies became an issue. However, this was not until
the 1980s, when many migrants had already lived in the country for
several decades. In these years, policy was mostly based on the idea that
migrants should integrate into Dutch society, while maintaining their
own identities: ‘integratie met behoud van eigen identiteit’ (Ghorashi, 2003).

210
 Towards a More Inclusive Feminism 211

The beginning of the migration critical discourse can be connected to

the first statements against this approach towards migrants and other
cultures, such as the one by Bolkestein (Prins, 2002).
In Voorbij de Onschuld (Beyond Innocence), Baukje Prins argues
that the harsh discussions about multiculturalism and Islam in the
Netherlands show that since the 1990s a new public discourse has
arisen (Prins, 2004). An essential element of this ‘neorealist’ discourse
is emancipation. Even though none of the neorealists seem to have
shown any interest in women’s rights before, they now use gender
relations to define their own identity as opposite to the ‘Other’. For
most of the neorealist opinion leaders gender is an important example
to explain what is wrong with multiculturalism/Islam/minority
cultures, but none of them saw emancipation really as the main issue.
In 2001, however, one of the well-known feminists of the Netherlands
spoke out. In an interview with a national newspaper on International
Women’s Day, Ciska Dresselhuys (at that time chief editor of the
popular feminist magazine Opzij) says that women who wear head-
scarves cannot work for her: ‘In a coffee shop I don’t endure sexism;
circumcision is a taboo for me and editors with a headscarf can’t work
for Opzij’ (Dresselhuys, 2001).
The feminist believes that the headscarf is a sign of women’s oppres-
sion; any woman wearing one, therefore, cannot be a feminist and thus
cannot work for a feminist magazine. Dresselhuys’s words led to a hot
discussion in the Netherlands, first of all because it was probably illegal
for her, as an employer, to judge possible employees on their appear-
ance. But besides this legal problem, the claims of Dresselhuys pointed
out that the so-called problems with migration and multiculturalism
were not only a problem of right-wing politicians but also an essential
issue within feminism.
Mainstream Western feminism is generally known as secular. Women
in this movement have fought religious dogmas and paternalistic gender
patterns in religious texts and traditions. However, for many women all
over the world religion is also an important part of their lives. Some
of them try to combine their religious beliefs and feminist ideals. For
a long time, their discussions remained in the margins, but in the last
few years, ‘mainstream’ feminists are forced to rethink their standpoint
about religion. Many of them remain critical about the relationship
between religion and feminism, but others emphasize the importance of
recognizing differences between women and reinvestigating the relation-
ship between religion, secularism, and feminism. In her article on the
feminist postsecular turn, Rosi Braidotti, for example, states, ‘feminists
212 Eva Midden

cannot be simply secular, or be secular in a simple or self-evident sense.

More complexity is needed’ (Braidotti, 2008: 4).
In this chapter, I will discuss the results of the nine focus groups
that I held with women from various women’s organizations in the
Netherlands. The interviews were semi-structured and covered the main
aspects of the discussions about culture, religion, and feminism. The
aim is to combine the arguments of women who are actively involved
in organizations with critical theory on the postsecular turn. The final
goal is to redefine the relationship between religion, secularism, and
feminism in a more affirmative and inclusive manner.
The research project is set in the Netherlands for two reasons. First,
the debate in the Netherlands has been rather heated and at the top of
the political agenda; think, for example, of the violent occurrences in
the past (the murder of film director Theo van Gogh and the constant
threats to kill politicians like Ayaan Hirsi Ali), but also of the recent
dismissal of Tariq Ramadan, both as advisory of the city of Rotterdam
and as professor at the University of Rotterdam.1 Secondly, due to my
background and location, the Netherlands is the most logical starting
point for my research. I am familiar with the political, social, and histor-
ical context and can therefore explore parameters in the debate that
only someone who has lived in this location can. But even though this
research is first of all based on a particular location, it is not solely a
particular case. The debates about multiculturalism, integration, and
Islam are not only important in the Netherlands but in many other
(European) countries as well. And even though some of the historical,
political, and social contexts differ in these countries, other aspects of
the debate are similar. The recurrent debates about headscarves and
burqas in, for example, Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium show that
ideas about womanhood, gender equality, agency, cultural difference,
and religious practices play an important role in public discourses all
over Europe (and probably beyond).

Thinking feminism through the postsecular

This chapter has been much inspired by the so-called postsecular turn
and more affirmative perspectives on the relationship between religion
and feminism. I would like to make it explicit that even though I write
this as a non-religious or secular feminist, I believe that feminism can
no longer afford a strict secular approach. First of all, this would exclude
a large group of women for whom religion/culture are very important.
And secondly, it seems impossible to disconnect this approach from
 Towards a More Inclusive Feminism 213

Islamophobist politics. As we could see in the introduction of this

chapter, in many public debates, gender equality functions as one of
the arguments against multiculturalism in general, or Islam specifically.
Sometimes this means that feminism is (mis)used for racist purposes.
I do not mean to argue that this kind of misuse of feminist theories
should automatically mean that feminists have to change their ideas,
but I do think that we might need to reconsider our strategies. In my
view, postsecular theory can be an important step in that direction and
help to rethink the relationship between religion and feminism.
Bracke and Schmitt argue that despite the ‘historic reluctance of tradi-
tional left wing and feminist movements, we can already recognize a
greater interest in religious issues and identities within these groups’
(Bracke and Schmitt, 2006: 11). This is connected to the above-men-
tioned conservative claim on secularism and the consequential link
to racism and Islamophobia. Another important reason to commit to
religious or postsecular dialogues could be the creation of a pluralist
alternative to the current polarization. I argue that feminism cannot be
strictly secular anymore and that the postsecular turn needs to be taken
into account in the discussions about religion and feminism. In other
words, a critical perspective on secularism and its relation to religion is
a necessary aspect of a productive and inclusive (re)definition of femi-
nism. Among other things, this includes critical analyses of what secu-
larism is and does in our society.
Secularism builds on a certain concept of the world and the problems
in that world (Asad, 2003: 191–192). This means that it has different
meanings depending on time and location. Thus, above all, secularism
is not the logical and reasonable ‘successor’ of faith. Bolette Blaagaard
refers to this simplistic dichotomous use of secularism and religion as
‘secular illiteracy’ (Blaagaard, 2007). She argues that both secularism
and the Enlightenment have strong ties to Christianity and that only
forgetfulness makes the strict opposition between a religious ‘them’
and a secular ‘us’ possible. Furthermore, the ignorance of the secular
legacy is closely connected to whiteness, or the invisibility of the white
norm. Therefore, we need more knowledge and understanding of the
relationship between Christianity, secularism, and so-called enlightened
Western societies (Blaagaard, 2007: 13). I absolutely agree on this and
would like to argue that an inclusive feminism should invest more in
critically evaluating feminism’s (assumed) relation to secularism. This
would remove the ‘Other’ from the centre of attention and create space
for a feminist analysis on a broader basis, without stigmatizing certain
groups of women.
214 Eva Midden

This chapter is also inspired by the recent debates on agency and

subjectivity, which I would also connect to the postsecular turn. The
women in the focus groups mentioned that they want to become eman-
cipated in a non-self-centred way and take into account the wishes and
needs of their families and friends. This connects to the work of Saba
Mahmood, who, among other things, reconceptualizes the traditional
conception of agency by detaching it from the simply dichotomous rela-
tion of subversion and subordination and leaving open the possibility of
learning from others (Mahmood, 2005). However, despite the fact that it
is important to note that there is agency beyond oppositional conscious-
ness, the comments of the women in the focus groups on religion and
knowledge also show that we need alternative analyses of what oppo-
sitional consciousness is. I would like to refer here to Rosi Braidotti’s
conceptualization of political subjectivity that starts from ‘multiple
micro-political practices of daily activism or interventions’ (Braidotti,
2008: 16). This interpretation of subjectivity is a crucial instrument
in many debates about religion and feminism because it helps us to
conceptualize a feminism that can fight certain harmful traditions or
customs without condemning religions or cultures in a general and stig-
matizing way.
The final aspect that I would like to mention at this point in regard to
rethinking religion and feminism through critical and postsecular theory
is the concept of ‘affirmative ethics’. One of the consequences of this
approach is that we have to acknowledge the fact that we cannot change
the world in a second; change takes time. Or as one of the women said:
we have to see this as a process and not try to pin everything down
beforehand. I would argue that we could theorize these remarks further
through Braidotti’s ideas on ‘affirmative ethics’. This interpretation of
ethics is not ‘tied to the present by negation’ but is instead ‘affirma-
tive and geared to creating possible futures’ (Braidotti, 2008: 11). Thus,
instead of trying to deconstruct or criticize certain identities or subjectiv-
ities, we should affirm them and think about the possibilities they create
and the alternatives they can offer to current views on these issues. This
means that difference is regarded as positive (instead of negative) and
can form the basis of transformation or ‘creative becoming’ (Braidotti,
2008: 11).

Approach and sample

In the previous sections, I have shown that the public discourse in

the Netherlands has for a long time not only focused on migration
 Towards a More Inclusive Feminism 215

and integration issues but also often connected minority cultures, and
especially Islam, to gender- and emancipation-related issues. The main
purpose is to broaden the perspectives on the relationship between reli-
gion, secularism, and feminism by referring to the arguments and expe-
riences of women who are active in grass-roots women’s organizations
(see Harding, 2004 for an elaborate analysis of the value of women’s
experiences in knowledge production). A total of nine focus groups were
held in order to discuss topics of religion and emancipation.2
In order to get an adequate range of answers to these questions, it
was necessary to obtain a broad sample that would be representative
of the diversity in women’s organizations in the Netherlands. Nine
different organizations were chosen to cover the major groups that have
a say in the debate.3 The organizations differed in terms of main target
group (country of origin, religious affiliation, civil status), action process
(discussion, self-help, or information centres), and focus of interven-
tion (emancipation, empowerment, or experience sharing). The aim was
to bring together as many different organizations as possible, in order
to produce as many different arguments as possible. The organizations
in the sample were selected because they were interested in feminism
or emancipation-related issues and in cultural and religious issues (or
diversity).4
The main approach for this paper is based on critical discourse analysis
(CDA), following especially the work of Norman Fairclough (Fairclough,
2001). The reason for this is that power and power relations are central
in his work. Fairclough has a background in linguistics but developed
an approach to discourse, which is also useful for social scientists and
philosophers. Social relations, he argues, are for a large part determined
by linguistics, and language is not just a tool we use to express social
processes but part of these processes themselves.

Thinking about inclusive feminisms

Religion and culture: knowledge is power

Muslim women have developed various strategies when it comes to
thinking about and working with their religion and emancipation, such
as emphasizing the multiple discourses connected to religious traditions
and reinterpreting and re-translating holy texts (Cooke, 2002). They
criticize individuals and institutions that limit and oppress them (both
within and outside Islam) and argue that we need to invest in alterna-
tive explanations of the Qur’an, which start from the main messages of
the Qur’an, and also contextualize the texts (Barlas, 2005).
216 Eva Midden

The women in the focus groups also referred to these kinds of strate-
gies in order to navigate between religious traditions and obligations
and emancipation. The differences between religion and culture are also
part of this. One woman from Al Nisa, for example, argued:

We cannot just blame culture; religion also plays a part in it, and
therefore it is so important that women have proper knowledge on,
for example, the Hadith. If a man for instance uses a Hadith … which
is very negative about women. … As a woman you should have
knowledge of the Hadith so that you can say, ok, you have one, I can
show you ten that say the opposite. (Al Nisa, 43 min.)

Another woman adds to this that we have to acknowledge the relation

between culture and religion:

The traditional interpretations of the Qur’an and the Hadith are

cultural and date from the seventh-century Arabic peninsula, which
was a patriarchal society. So it is not just culture. We have to be aware
how culture has influenced religion and the interpretation of reli-
gion, and how it has become oppressive to women in certain ways.
(Al Nisa, 43 min.)

The interesting aspect of this woman’s argument is that she, on the one
hand, tells us to recognize how culture and religion are interwoven in
the interpretation of religion as we now know it (see above), but that,
at the same time, we have to be aware of the distinction between reli-
gion and culture and recognize that Islam often leaves more space to
women than culture does (Al Nisa, 44 min.). This way, she can both
criticize certain practices within her religion and resist those same
practices by referring to holy texts. The key here is to recognize both
the power relations involved and the possible differences within reli-
gious traditions and, finally, to give more attention to the distinction
between certain practices (or in this case, religious traditions) and
theory (or the holy texts). This approach opens a road to resistance
from within, which is necessary, the women from Al Nisa add, because
just recognizing the differences between culture and religion and text
and interpretation does not change anything about the interpretations
that are still dominant (Al Nisa, 44 min.). An interesting example of
this kind of resistance from within is the remark of one woman, who
recalls the moment when a woman on the street addressed her about
her blouse:
 Towards a More Inclusive Feminism 217

supposedly my blouse was to tight on the back, because she saw a

man looking at me. The only thing I told her was: then, why did you
not approach that man then? (Al Nisa, 53 min.)

Of course this is just an innocent incident, but it does show how one can
make others conscious of the fact that being modest is not just expected
from women but also from men and, hence, that it is a mistake to only
hold women responsible for this. I would argue that this also relates
to Rosi Braidotti’s interpretation of subjectivity. This woman’s remarks
are closely connected to the ‘multiple micro-political practices of daily
activism or interventions in and around the world we inhabit’ (Braidotti,
2008: 16) of which political subjectivity consists in Braidotti’s words.

Would you call yourself a feminist?

When the word ‘feminism’ was brought up in the focus groups, often the
atmosphere changed almost immediately. Laughter and yelling were, in
many cases, an important part of the response. Some women instantly
confirmed they were feminists, others opposed to using the term. In
the focus group with Al Nisa, for example, there was a discussion about
calling yourself a feminist or not. All the women in the group were inter-
ested in Islam and emancipation (those were also the central themes of
their organization), but the term feminism led to a rather heated debate.
‘What is a feminist?’ was their main question. The first woman, who
tried to answer the question, argued that if there were any term she
would like to use to describe herself it would be ‘Muslim woman’5 (Al
Nisa, 30 min.). In her view, this word automatically entails all the other
things that are important in life. This connects to remarks made by the
women in Daral Arquam as well. The argument is that as a Muslim you
are already committing to constant learning and developing the self and
hence to emancipation. This means that she does not just argue that
emancipation and Islam are compatible or that Islam inspires her in her
struggle for emancipation, but that Islam is emancipation.
The differences and similarities between feminism and emancipa-
tion were mentioned in almost all the focus groups. In most groups,
women could not agree on what feminism was or is, but very often it
was associated with a struggle for and by women (for example, Al Nisa,
FNV, Daral Arquam), contrary to emancipation, which was considered
to apply to everybody. Some women did not want to call themselves
feminists because they associated it with ‘hating men’ or ‘being against
men’ (for instance, in Yasmin group). Besides the above-mentioned
and rather stereotypical argument, the most mentioned reason was a
218 Eva Midden

general feeling of alienation with Western mainstream feminism, or

‘Cisca Dresselhuys feminism’,6 as the women from Al Nisa called it (Al
Nisa, 37 min.).
It appeared that many women associated feminism with the stand-
points of the Dutch feminist magazine, Opzij, and for that reason do not
call themselves feminists (Al Nisa, 37 min.). Feminism, in this view, is
too much based on the male norm:

They [feminists who write for Opzij, EM] want women to become ‘less
female’7 and that goes against my views on the relationship between
men and women. And also within Islam you can’t work on feminism
and emancipation this way. … You should actually stay close to the
people that are close to you. Within Islam there is more than enough
space to emancipate and become feminist. So I would suggest making
a clear distinction between Opzij feminism … and Islam feminism. All
women in this group would support the latter. (Al Nisa, 37 min.)

As becomes clear from this quote, it is almost impossible to discuss the

relationship between feminism and emancipation without addressing
the negative associations many Muslim women have with (mainstream,
secular) feminism. These women are interested in a feminist struggle,
but not as it is interpreted by certain Western feminists at this moment.
Or, as one of the women in the focus groups argued:

All kinds of ideals related to women’s appearance are not criticized –

nudity, having to look young, and all the photoshopping – and the
women who want something else, than what men want, are not
accepted. (Al Nisa, 37 min.)

This is an often-heard comparison or complaint: women with a head-

scarf are criticized for being anti-feminist and women in mini-skirts are
considered to be feminists. These different views on feminism can be
related to religion but also seem to refer to a different interpretation of
sexual difference. Or, to put it in other words, religion might not have
so much influence on these women’s views on emancipation but more
on their perspective on sexual difference.
This is confirmed by the work of historian Joan Scott on the poli-
tics of the veil in France. She argues that French Republicanism deals
with sexual difference by denying it; Muslim communities, on the other
hand, acknowledge that sexual difference can cause problems in society
and therefore aim to manage them. Hence, the discussions about the
 Towards a More Inclusive Feminism 219

headscarf might not be about equality between men and women but
about making Muslim women equal to French women (Scott, 2005).
Apparently, French women could only be ‘equal’ by openly displaying
their sexuality and sexual desire. The real problem of the headscarf,
from this perspective, is thus that by ‘covering women’s sexuality’, the
Western secular view of sexual difference is countered. Of course, the
French debates on headscarves are particularly located in the French
context and cannot too easily be compared to discussions in other
European countries, but we can use the argument proposed above. For
example, if we apply the ideas about the importance of sexual difference
to the remarks made by the women of Al Nisa, we see that these women
not only have different ideas about the relationship between religion
and feminism but, from there, also make a different feminist analyses
about sexual difference. This perspective makes it possible to move the
focus of the debate from religion and could open up new possibilities
for dialogue.

‘Jumping generations’8
When the women of SCALA discussed the problematic associations with
the word feminism and asked themselves whether ‘feminists’ should for
that reason come up with a new term, it was argued that this would be
disrespectful to the generations before us who had achieved so much
already in respect to women’s rights (SCALA, 50 min.). Quickly after
agreeing on having respect for previous generations, however, also the
tensions between these different generations turned up. Especially with
the women from SCALA and ZAMI, the discussions on this subject
showed very explicitly how we have to find a middle ground between
respecting the achievements of previous generations and, at the same
time, accept the fact that different circumstances can lead to new femi-
nist analyses. The women of SCALA experienced the differences between
generations in their own group. A ‘younger’ woman made the following
argument:

Second wave feminists made it possible for us to make our own

choices but are now also preventing us from making choices that
they don’t like. (SCALA, 55 min.)

Besides the issue of making your own choices, also other points of criti-
cism on ‘Second Wave’ feminism were mentioned in the focus groups.
In the ZAMI group, for example, it was argued that they focus too much
on gender alone in their analyses and neglect to pay attention to other
220 Eva Midden

axes of difference, such as ethnicity or religion (ZAMI, 17 min.). This

causes them to investigate only certain issues and to make limited anal-
ysis of problems and solutions. Another point, which is related to this,
is that most ‘second-wave feminists’ are too much focused on the issue
of work: ‘the only thing women still have to achieve is to work more
and to get to higher positions’ (Al Nisa, 38 min.). Even though more
and more research is published on the relationship between different
generations of feminists, in general, or third-wave feminism, specifically
(e.g., Henry, 2004; Tuin, 2009; Redfern and Aune, 2010), the particular
relationship between feminist generations and religion is still under-
researched. As becomes clear in the previous statements, many women
in my interviews have certain complaints about ‘second-wave feminism’
and they connect it to the issue of religion and difference. To put it
bluntly: second-wave feminism is associated with a limited interpreta-
tion of feminism, that focuses on sexual difference and socio-economic
issues, such as work, and does not leave much space for other interpreta-
tions. Even though this might be an unfair accusation, the remark does
bring many questions to mind about the relationship and conceptuali-
zation of various feminist generations.
In her work on epistemology of different generations of feminism,
Iris van der Tuin investigates how we can capture generational change
(Tuin, 2009). She proposes a methodology of ‘jumping generations’, in
order to use and implement parts of ‘second-wave’ feminism, where it
is useful for current generations, without falling into the trap of linear
thinking. We should neither idealize previous feminist generations nor
reject them completely. This is exactly how I read the remarks of one of
the women in SCALA: they do not want to let go of the word feminism,
but would like to start from the struggles that previous generations
have fought and think how we can conceptualize feminism from there,
taking into account changes in our societies. One of these changes, I
would argue, is that religion has become such an important issue that
secular feminists have to take it into account in their analyses as well.
The women in ZAMI, who also described how problematic it is to ignore
religion as an important factor in feminist analyses, confirm this:

For these older white women religion apparently is not an issue, but
for black/migrant and refugee women it is. But also politically it is an
important issue, aren’t these women looking at our society? It is on
the political agenda. These were all second-wave feminists, and they
are completely outside of reality. (ZAMI, 16 min.)
 Towards a More Inclusive Feminism 221

This woman’s remarks are rather generalizing second-wave feminists and

seem to ignore the importance of, for example, black feminists during
the second wave of feminism, but I would agree with this statement on
one point: as a secular/atheist feminist, you couldn’t ignore the political
developments in the world. As religion is such an important issue in
local, national, and international politics nowadays, feminists cannot
simply ignore it in their analyses. The concept of ‘jumping generations’
would be a good starting point for this. One of the women from SCALA
connects to this with her remarks on the third wave: ‘if you want to
make the new wave a vibrant one, you have to create a situation where
women can be themselves, where women … can choose to do what they
want at this moment’ (ZAMI, 57 min.). Or, as she put it earlier in the
interview, the third wave should be a ‘warm wave’ (ZAMI, 36 min.). In
this context she proposes to think through connections instead of all
working in our own niches.

Back to basics?

One of the things that came back in many of the interviews was the
question: how do we frame the subjects that we are fighting for? One
can, for instance, focus on something like circumcision, but another
possibility would be to concentrate on broader issues that can connect
more people; violence against women, for example. This vision seems
to correspond to the remarks described above where a woman proposes
to think through connections instead of ‘working on our own little
corners’. Also in the E-Quality focus group, the women aim to work
through such a model. The starting point for E-Quality is the concept of
‘equal opportunities’. This makes it possible to produce a more nuanced
analysis of the problems and solutions at hand. It also helps them to go
beyond the dichotomous relation of the supposedly oppressed Muslim
women and the emancipated ‘autochtonous’ women:

Autochtonous women can learn from, for example, Surinamese

women, because they dealt with work issues and participation in a
different way. Allochtonous women are not in all cases in a disadvan-
taged position. There are areas in which black/migrant and refugee
women are ahead, we can learn from that and there are areas where
it is the other way around, or where men are in a worse position, that
also needs attention. In that context all inequality is problematic.
(E-Quality, 27min.)
222 Eva Midden

Even though this approach holds on to a form of linear thinking, the

advantages of defining feminist struggle on such a broader basis is that
it will probably appeal to more women, but also that there is less chance
of denigrating women from certain cultures/religions. The women
emphasize the importance of not focusing on specific issues connected
to specific groups but to building alliances and joined struggles between
women. One of the ways to achieve this is to work on broader themes
that prevent women to be divided into oppressed and emancipated but
make space for more dynamic cooperation. Furthermore, more atten-
tion should be given to the different interpretations of emancipation.
For most of the women in the focus groups this term is, first of all,
about making your own choices. For example, not all women want to
emancipate through work or having a career. A woman in Daral Arquam
explained very clearly that, in her opinion, emancipation should not be
confused with self-centredness:

Emancipation is about making your own choices, but everybody

makes those choices within a certain framework. For me this means
that I am emancipated because I, most of the time, choose to do
what I want, but I also take into account the needs and wishes of my
husband and children. (Daral Arquam, 17 min.)

If we bring these remarks about emancipation together with the above, we

can conclude that the women in the focus groups are constantly empha-
sizing the importance of broadening and contextualizing the debates and
struggles for emancipation: work with broader themes to enhance soli-
darity, work with broader definitions to include more women’s perspec-
tives, and adjust your analysis to current and local situations.

Approaching feminism and diversity

In many of the interviews, the women in the group put forward that if
we want a more inclusive feminism, we need to contextualize and be
open to alternative interpretations of feminism. Furthermore, we have
to be conscious of the fact that everybody brings his/her background
into the feminist struggle and that these backgrounds are constructed
through many different axes of meaning (gender, ethnicity, race, sexu-
ality, ability, etc.). Feminist standpoints cannot be formed (automati-
cally) through one’s gender alone. This connects to the remarks of the
women in the ZAMI group; feminism in their view is always about diver-
sity (ZAMI, 34 min.). In that context one woman in this group also
introduces the (as she calls it) ‘and/and strategy’9:
 Towards a More Inclusive Feminism 223

We should let go of the either/or strategy of referring to people as

either woman, or black. You are a black woman, a mother maybe.
That perspective gives you the total image. (ZAMI, 37 min.)

When I asked the women in the group whether they are sometimes
confronted with issues that make it difficult to think through the ‘and/
and strategy’, they indeed mentioned some cases in which it is difficult
to see whether something needs to be respected as a different interpreta-
tion of emancipation or considered as a harmful tradition. But according
to another woman in the group, it is important to realize that:

The and/and strategy does not mean that you cannot be critical or
search for dialogue. Being critical and the search for dialogue also
help with consciousness raising. (ZAMI, 43 min.)

This important remark can be helpful when one combines it with the
contextualizing strategy, but it also shows a certain tension within these
women’s thinking on feminism. On the one hand, they want feminism
to be inclusive and respectful towards diversity; on the other hand, they
want to raise consciousness among women. One woman in the ZAMI
group emphasizes the importance of getting to know each other’s stand-
points and working together, despite certain differences:

Try to find reciprocity and create something new that way, use your
creativity. This way you do not hold on to your own thing, but by
working together you create something new … a new society, that
starts from working together. (ZAMI, 45 min.)

So, the starting point for the women in this group is respect for differ-
ence, being open to other women’s standpoints, experiences, and strat-
egies, and to create a dialogue and maybe cooperation from that. As
I mentioned before, this does not necessarily mean that you agree on
everything; rather, it means you begin with an open mind. If you really
believe something needs to be changed or that women should become
more conscious on certain issues, you can always try to convince them,
but only in an open dialogue. The women in this group were also still in
favour of consciousness raising and developing laws that help women
to get a better position in society. Or, as one woman put it: ‘you have to
work on different levels, you have to fix things in more areas than one’
(ZAMI, 52 min.). In some cases these different levels will work simulta-
neously; in other cases, there might be tensions that need to be discussed
224 Eva Midden

in their own context: ‘we shouldn’t try to pin everything down before-
hand’ (ZAMI, 58 min.). In my view, these remarks, especially in regard
to dialogue, respect for difference, and openness, very much connect to
the arguments of Rosi Braidotti about ‘affirmative ethics’, specifically,
and the postsecular turn, in general. This interpretation of ethics is not
‘tied to the present by negation’ but is instead ‘affirmative and geared
to creating possible futures’ (Braidotti, 2008: 11). Thus, instead of trying
to deconstruct or criticize certain identities or subjectivities, we should
affirm them and think about the possibilities they create and the alter-
natives they can offer to current views on these issues. This means that
difference is regarded as positive (instead of negative) and can form
the basis of transformation or ‘creative becoming’ (Braidotti, 2008: 11).
Central to Braidotti’s approach is that we affirm otherness and hence
do not focus on sameness. According to Braidotti, we can do this by
changing our view on pain and suffering. Instead of dealing with pain
by denying it, or trying to go against it, we should find ways to work
through the pain (Braidotti, 2008: 16). This confirms the argument of
the women in the focus groups that we should approach the relationship
between multiculturalism and feminism as a process, rather than trying
to achieve instant change. Furthermore, it connects to the idea that it is
more productive to develop alternative interpretations of certain tradi-
tions and practices, rather than dismissing them altogether.

Concluding remarks: towards a more inclusive feminism

In this article I have described and analysed the results of the nine focus
groups I held with women from various women’s organizations in the
Netherlands. The main aim of these group interviews was to produce
alternative and situated knowledges about the relationship between
culture, religion, and feminism.
Many women in the interviews emphasized how important it is to
know more about their religion and the holy texts and to develop a
better understanding of the relationship between religion and culture.
This way, women can criticize certain religious traditions by referring
to holy texts. The key here is to recognize the power relations involved,
acknowledge the possible differences within religious traditions, and
create distinctions between certain practices (or in this case, religious
traditions) and theory (or the holy texts).
Feminism was a rather contested term among the participants of the
focus groups; something they associated with anti-religious statements,
limited interpretations of emancipation, and the exclusion of men. Some
 Towards a More Inclusive Feminism 225

mentioned that particularly ‘second-wave’ feminists are ignoring reli-

gion and culture in their feminist analyses. In several groups, the women
theorized what a third wave should look like; warm and inclusive was
the general outcome of these discussions. Other conclusions that came
out of the interviews were related to the issues at stake for feminism and
the approaches to take towards them. Several women warned against
fighting for ‘your own little corners’ and instead proposed to frame
problems in a larger context in order to make it possible for women to
connect on these issues. Finally, they argued for a contextualized and
intersectional approach towards feminism.
Interpretations of feminism and emancipation varied greatly between
the different women in the focus groups. Some women instantly
defined themselves as feminists, while others were opposed to using the
term. In the case of the latter, many preferred to think of themselves
as ‘emancipated’. These women are interested in a struggle for equality
but not as it is interpreted by certain Western feminists at present. Some
women, therefore, argue that we have to struggle for different interpre-
tations of feminism; others prefer to use the more neutral term eman-
cipation. For most of the women in the focus groups, emancipation
was about making your own choices and not just about having a career.
Furthermore, the women made the important point that emancipation
is about making choices within a certain framework, such as the needs
and wishes of your friends and family. In that sense, they explicitly
criticized individualistic interpretations of emancipation that ignore
these ties.
Another point that is important in this context is the interpreta-
tion of subjectivity. Alternative views on this key concept can help
feminists to open up alternative ways of structuring one’s life and
achieving change. This approach would also make it possible to
start a dialogue amongst women about feminism, without asking
minority women to give up their beliefs or cultural background. A
radical dismissal of these beliefs and traditions on the basis of certain
dominant views would completely erase these women’s struggles and
power to achieve change. Furthermore, it prevents feminists from
actually discussing the issues at stake, rather than constantly empha-
sizing certain principles.
In short, the results of the focus groups show that a more inclu-
sive feminism can be applied in practice by working with overlapping
themes in order to enhance solidarity, developing alternative definitions
of emancipation to include more women’s perspectives, and adjusting
analyses to current and local contexts and power relations.
226 Eva Midden

Notes
1. See, for instance, http://www.nrc.nl/international/article2332245.ece/
Rotterdam_fires_Tariq_Ramadan_over_Iranian_TV_show.
2. The interaction and multi-vocal narratives that occur in focus groups make
them a highly suitable method for accessing certain marginalized or ‘subju-
gated’ voices (Leavy, 2007). First of all, focus groups are generally considered
to create the most equal relationship possible between researcher and inter-
viewees (Wilkinson, 2004). Contrary to a one-to-one interview, in a focus
group the researcher is outnumbered by the interviewees. This can make it
easier for them to take control of the conversation and shift the balance of
power. The effect is strengthened by the fact that focus groups are often only
partly structured by the researcher. In other words, there are plenty of possi-
bilities for the interviewees to influence the development of the discussion
and to steer it in a different direction from the one the researcher might have
planned.
3. BIZ, ZAMI, FNV Vrouwenbond, Daral Arquam, Yasmin, Al Nisa, E-Quality,
SCALA, and Interreligieuze Dialoog.
4. All focus groups were held in the period between April and June 2008. The
amount of women for one interview ranged from 4 to 20. I always started the
conversation by introducing myself, in order to be accountable for my own
position and background. The interviews were semi-structured, which means
that I prepared certain questions on important themes, such as culture, reli-
gion, emancipation, empowerment, participation, and current political
issues, while also allowing for free association on the relationship between
multiculturalism and feminism. Considering the main aim of these inter-
views (exploring different ways of thinking about multiculturalism and femi-
nism), it was important to discuss certain themes, but also to leave enough
space for the interviewees to put forward other issues.
5. She used the Dutch term ‘Moslima’.
6. See also the introduction of this paper: Cisca Dresselhuys was, for a long
time, the chief editor of a feminist magazine in the Netherlands. She is very
much known for her critical view on religion.
7. She said, ‘Ze doen aan ontvrouwelijking’.
8. See Tuin (2009), ‘Jumping Generations’.
9. She used the word ‘en/en strategie’.

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12
Blasphemous Feminist Art:
Incarnate Politics of Identity in
Postsecular Perspective
Anne-Marie Korte

Introduction: ‘blasphemous’ feminist art

Among the increasing number of publicly exhibited works of art

that have become accused of blasphemy or sacrilege in the context
of cultural identity politics in Western societies, religiously connoted
feminist art works and performances seem to stand out and to fulfil a
particularly provocative role. The concerned works of art have remark-
able common traits in their disputed imagery. They connect almost
palpable and often naked human bodies to iconic sacred scenes of
Western Christian culture and art, such as the suffering Jesus Christ
on the cross, the Last Supper, the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus, or
the Pietà (Mater Dolorosa). Well known examples are works such as
Ecce Homo by Elisabeth Ohlson (Sweden), I.N.R.I. by Serge Bramly and
Bettina Rheims (France), Yo Mama’s Last Supper by Renée Cox (USA), Our
Lady by Alma López (USA), The Blood Ties by Katarzyna Kozyra (Poland),
and Passion by Dorota Nieznalska (Poland). More recently, also songs
and acts consisting of social, political, and religious critique, performed
‘provocatively’ by pop and punk artists such as Madonna, Lady Gaga,
and the Russian formation Pussy Riot, have become publicly contested
for comparable reasons. All these works of visual or performative art
have been accused – more or less formally – of blasphemy or sacrilege,
which contributed to both their notoriety and their controversiality
by causing huge media attention. Not only conservative religious
interest groups and religious leaders and representatives have targeted
these art works and performances, but also secular politicians and civil
authorities have declared them offensive, and both parties have tried

228
 Blasphemous Feminist Art 229

or even succeeded to stop, prohibit, or ban their public exhibition or

performance.1
The works of art and performances involved are created by predomi-
nantly female artists, performers, and activists who explicate their aim to
contribute to the emancipation of women and ethnic or sexual minori-
ties. They explain that, for this end, they address and in some aspects
re-enact or rework the faith traditions they have been raised in. (In all
these cases this pertains to particular forms of Christianity, as will be
discussed later.) In their work, they consciously bring together emanci-
patory issues and core religious imagery of their own upbringings. They
focus in particular on the presentation and staging of human bodies
(including their own) in their most sensitive aspects (i.e., as naked,
delicate, sensuous, vulnerable, wounded, tortured). According to them,
this is the material or medium by which they envision both their most
hurtful and their most hopeful and joyous experiences, while at the
same time this offers them ammunition for political, cultural, and reli-
gious criticism. They often use the controversy that their work evokes
as an enlarged public podium to state their political and artistic views
(cf. Heartney, 2003, 2004, 2007; Korte, 2009b; Papenburg and Zarzycka,
2013).
In this contribution, I aim to clarify why at present precisely these
‘religiously embodied’ feminist works of art so easily fall prone to contro-
versy, public upheaval, and legal pursuit, in particular to accusations of
blasphemy and sacrilege. The case of Madonna’s crucifixion scene in
her Confessions on a Dance Floor show (2006) will be my core example,
and the disciplinary fields that inform my analysis are religious studies,
theology, and gender studies. I will argue that the controversy that these
feminist works of art and performances evoke is related to the identity
politics of ethnic and sexual minorities, and of religious communities,
interest groups, and lobbyists, involved in a fight over shifting posi-
tions of privilege and marginalization in modern neoliberal societies.
The deliberate and ostentatious interplay of gendered corporeality and
(homo)sexuality with religious themes forms the symbolic arena of this
fight. The clashes that these works of art engender are positioned on the
fault line of religion and secularity, and their controversiality is deeply
embedded in the ideological debates over this demarcation.
It is my contention that the many instances of alleged blasphemous
imagery featuring gendered corporeality and non-heteronormative
sexuality that make up the so-called culture wars of the past two decades
are related to a particular social and cultural shift in modern and
predominantly secularizing societies regarding the public meaning of
230 Anne-Marie Korte

both religion and sexuality. This shift concerns the position and public
perception of both religion and sexuality as identity markers in their
mutual interrelatedness. At stake is an oscillating relationship of reli-
gion and sexuality as modern individual and collective markers of iden-
tity. Significant for this instability is the emergence of a dichotomous
public discourse in which a secular position is equated with accept-
ance of sexualities in the plural and a religious position with rejection
thereof. The cultural shift this implies could be seen as a reshuffling of
prominence, power, and visibility in relation to the former established
social and personal meaning of both religion and sexuality (Jakobsen
and Pellegrini, 2004; Jordan, 2011). Until late into the twentieth century
in Western countries, religious identity counted as a primary marker of
one’s social position, while sexual preference and behaviour were priva-
tized to the degree of invisibility. Most recently, the affirmation of sexu-
ality in the plural, in all its (public) manifestations, for many has come
to count as a core value of modern Western life, while religious identity
has become far more privatized, or is supposed to be so (Dudink, 2011;
El-Tayeb, 2012; Puar, 2007, 2011; Kuntsman, 2009). The many current
cultural conflicts gravitating around religion, gender roles, and sexual
diversity thus are not only indicators of changing views of sexuality and
its role in the formation of individual and collective identity, but also
of the fundamentally changing role of religion in modern society (Van
den Berg et al., 2014). This is why I think that an attentive investigation
of these interrelated changes, both in a postsecular perspective and in
a gender critical perspective, should be at the forefront of the analysis of
contemporary accusations of ‘blasphemous’ works of art. Before starting
to discuss my casus I will first elaborate these perspectives of analysis.

Blasphemous art in postsecular and gender-critical

perspective

On 23–26 October 2012, the World Conference on Artistic Freedom of

Expression took place in Oslo, Norway, under the heading of ‘All that
is banned is desired’. It included a brief appearance of a member of the
besieged Pussy Riot punk formation. A central cause of concern was
expressed that censorship by religious organizations and the phenom-
enon of religiously argued bans on artistic freedom of expression are
on the rise, against the expectations of ‘many in the West’ (Denselow,
2012:15). However, since the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989,
Western attention has actually centred predominantly on censorship and
attacks originating from militant fundamentalist Islam. This tendency
 Blasphemous Feminist Art 231

of interest also became visible at the Oslo conference. The fact that there
is also an increase of Christian groups and institutions in the USA and
Europe that raise objections to or try to ban works of art is less publicly
discussed. But actually already in 1987, the exhibition of Andres Serrano’s
controversial photograph Piss Christ, winner of the Southeastern Center
for Contemporary Art’s Awards in the Visual Arts competition and partly
sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, opened a national
and recurrent debate in the USA, fuelled by Christian organizations, on
the conditions and restrictions for the creation and exposition of art
funded by public means. The subsequent exhibition of Serrano’s Piss
Christ in museums in Australia, Great Britain, and France raised similar
debates and confrontations on a local and national level, including
physical attacks on the exposed photograph at the National Gallery of
Art of Victoria in 1997 (cf. Verrips, 2008). When, in September 2012,
Piss Christ was on display at the Edward Tyler Nahem gallery in New
York, at the Andres Serrano overview Body and Spirit, religious groups
and politicians called for President Obama to denounce this work of art,
comparing it to the anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims (2012), which
had been condemned by the White House earlier that month.
In these and similar instances a resurging and pugnacious discourse
on blasphemy and sacrilege can be found in which both religious and
non-religious parties have a particular stake. At first sight, the manifes-
tation and spread of this discourse during the past two decades seems
to belie the fact that in the course of the twentieth century the legal
prohibition of blasphemy and sacrilege in most European countries (as
well as in the USA, Canada, and Australia) has gradually been waived,
diluted, or become obsolete. This paradoxical state of affairs has given
rise to discussion, initiated by philosophers, historians, theologians,
and scholars of religion, on the reappearance and meaning of (accu-
sations of) blasphemy and sacrilege in contemporary public debate.2
Cultural historian David Nash, specialized in the European history
of blasphemy, argues that blasphemy’s history unsettles both the
historiography of Christian religion and the twentieth-century secu-
larization theory engrafted in this history. Blasphemy’s present mani-
festations in Europe disturb the idea of a progressive rationalization
and privatization of religion. ‘Blasphemy’s illumination of conflict
models and incidents showed that belief was capable of ebbing and
flowing and appearing at pressure points in the interaction of indi-
viduals and societies’ (Nash, 2008: 16). I subscribe the general observa-
tion that the increased recourse to (the discourse of) blasphemy and
sacrilege to oppose or ban culture critical statements and performances
232 Anne-Marie Korte

reflects power struggles and cultural identity politics – also addressed

as ‘culture wars’ – in postsecular, neoliberal, and multi-religious soci-
eties. However, I do not consider the accusations of blasphemy and
sacrilege only to be rearguard actions, relics of old times, or simply
mistakes of categories. Following scholar of religion Brent Plate, author
of the fascinating book Blasphemy: Art That Offends, I want to empha-
size the (co)incidental and composed character of blasphemy accusa-
tions in their relation to political and religious power struggles. The
discourse of blasphemy emerges between the production and reception
of artworks or performances, and needs to be studied by ‘taking into
account the proleptic and analeptic dimension of blasphemous events’
(Plate, forthcoming). As a scholar of religion, Plate defines blasphemy
as fundamentally consisting of acts of transgression, ‘crossing the lines
between the sacred and the profane in seemingly improper ways’ (Plate,
2006: 43). He proceeds that although there are no specific formal qual-
ities that blasphemous images and acts share, sexuality, nudity, and
bodily fluids seem to register in a great many of them. According to
Plate, they collectively point towards modern society’s dis-ease with
the human body itself, ‘that most intimate and yet most foreign of
entities’ (Plate, 2006: 47). Concurring with Mary Douglas’s symbolic
anthropological interpretation in Purity and Danger, Plate observes
that ‘impure mixings’ with these ingredients abound in contemporary
contentious imagery.
But these observations, although highly relevant to understand the
staging and impact of current public discourse on blasphemous art,
do not yet touch upon the pressing question of why gendered corpo-
reality and non-heteronormative sexuality are the very target of accu-
sations of blasphemy and sacrilege in so many contemporary cases.
They do not clarify why precisely the interplay of iconic religious
imagery with female corporeality and (homo)sexuality is perceived as
endangering the distinction between the sacred and the profane. As
theologian Sarah Maitland has shown, pointing to the famous accusa-
tions against Jesus, Paul, Dante, Galileo, and Darwin, blasphemy and
sacrilege in consecutive periods of Western cultural history have often
been located in areas other than those of gendered corporeality and
sexuality, as the fights over the operation of salvation, the shape of the
cosmos, and the definition of the civic state that have been at stake
in these accusations indicate (Maitland, 1997). Contentious imagery
has its own history and genealogy, which means that the question
of the prominence of instances of ‘blasphemous’ imagery featuring
 Blasphemous Feminist Art 233

gendered corporeality and sexual diversity in the culture wars of the

past two decades should be addressed in its particular details, imagery,
and resonance. Over and against art critics and other scholars, who
claim that allusions to gendered corporeality and (homo)sexuality
will per definition work provocatively in the context of iconic reli-
gious imagery because of the strong and potentially conflicting affec-
tive registers that are involved (cf. Freedberg, 1989; Verrips, 2008), I
esteem more fruitful an approach that explores these contested works
of art in relation to historical processes of shifting gender positions
and changing stances towards sexual diversity in Western moder-
nity. For instance, as theologian Margaret Miles has shown, in the
Renaissance period when the first collective shift of women from the
private to the public sphere took place in Europe, female nakedness
and sexuality became the focus of a newly explicit public and contro-
versial figuration in the arts (Miles, 1989). Feminist historians and art
critics have suggested that nineteenth and twentieth century’s move-
ments of women’s emancipation, and the strong political and cultural
opposition that these movements have met, created a similar impulse
to explore gendered corporeality and sexuality in artistic imagination
and cultural expressions.
Also, the modern transformations of religion with regard to the
distinction between the public and the private sphere should be incor-
porated in this analysis. In her seminal lecture ‘Sexularism’, Joan Scott
points to the nineteenth century’s increasing sexualization of women –
the reduction of women to body and sexuality – as inherent part of the
upcoming modern ideal of secularity in which the political and the reli-
gious, and the public and the private, became opposed along patterns
of strengthened gender dichotomy, conceived as a natural distinction
rooted in physical bodies. According to Scott, it has to be acknowledged
that the ‘domestication’ of women, or their increasing assignment to
the private sphere, as well as the simultaneous ‘feminization of religion’
took place in the context of the fast expansion of the modern Western
political and cultural ideal of secularity. ‘The public-private demarcation
so crucial to the secular/religious divide rests on a vision of sexual differ-
ence that legitimizes the political and social inequality of women and
men’ (Scott, 2009: 4). In modernity’s secular ambitions, in its struggle
with the hegemony of religious institutions and world views for liberal
ends, ‘feminized’ religion, women’s religiosity, and female sexuality have
become intertwined in their position as ‘the other’ of secular reason and
modern citizenship, when in the processes of secularization in the West
234 Anne-Marie Korte

women became more and more exclusively associated with both reli-
gion and the private sphere. As Scott argues:

The assignment of women and religion to the private sphere was

not – in the first articulations of the secular ideal – about the regula-
tion by religion of female sexuality. Rather feminine religiosity was
seen as a force that threatened to disrupt or undermine the rational
pursuits that constitute politics; like feminine sexuality it was exces-
sive, transgressive and dangerous. (Scott, 2009: 4)

The above developed, analytical perspectives help to clarify why contem-

porary works of art and performances that openly combine ‘feminized’
religion, women’s religiosity, and female sexuality while intending to
make critical feminist statements – works such as the ones I introduced
at the opening of this contribution – are potentially transgressive in
multifaceted ways and run the risk of being accused of offence, insult,
and defamation, not only by conservative religious groups and leaders
but also by secular politicians and civil authorities. I will now turn to a
more detailed analysis of Madonna’s crucifixion act to further elaborate
my position.

Madonna’s controversial crucifixion scene3

In her 2006 Confessions tour, America’s greatest female pop star ever,
Madonna, managed to upset many people around the world by staging
a crucifixion scene. Although Madonna had toyed with Christian
symbols such as crosses and crucifixes already frequently in her oeuvre,
here she launched a new incorporation of this symbol by staging herself
as the one who is crucified. Suspended on a huge shining silver disco
cross and wearing a crown of thorns, Madonna sung one of her famous
songs, ‘Live to Tell’, supported by an organ-laden, ‘churchly’ sounding
orchestration. Pictures of African AIDS orphans and texts from the New
Testament were projected on a big screen behind her. At the end she
stepped down from the cross, put down her crown and kneeled on
stage in a gesture of praying, while texts like: ‘For I was hungry and you
gave me food’ (Matt. 25:35–36) and ‘Whatever you did for one of these
least ones, you did for me’ (Matt. 25:40) shone in large letters above
Madonna’s head.
In most countries where Madonna performed during her Confessions
tour the crucifixion scene was heavily criticized. It was disqualified as
outrageous and blasphemous, in particular by Christian groups and
 Blasphemous Feminist Art 235

organizations, who often sought to prohibit the show. Catholic Church

leaders confronted with Madonna performing her show in Rome declared
her crucifixion act to be disrespectful, provocative, and a publicity stunt
in bad taste: ‘Being raised on a cross with a crown of thorns like a modern
Christ is absurd. Doing it in the cradle of Christianity comes close to
blasphemy’.4 Female Lutheran Bishop of Hannover Margot Kässmann,
the first woman ever to hold this position in Germany, commented that
‘to put oneself in the place of Jesus is an extraordinary form of overesti-
mation of one’s self’.5
In response to these accusations of hubris and of insulting God as
well as Christian believers by identifying herself with Jesus on the
cross, Madonna remarkably affirmed that she wanted to imitate Jesus
by staging this act. Taking up one’s cross and pleading to pay atten-
tion to Africa’s AIDS orphans is, so she claimed, fully in the spirit of
Jesus’s teachings. ‘I believe in my heart that if Jesus were alive today he
would be doing the same thing,’ she stated (2006). The fact that, in the
wake of her Confessions tour, Madonna adopted an AIDS orphan from
Malawi – who later turned out to be not a full orphan – also contrib-
uted to the controversial and paradoxical aspects of her performance.
For Madonna’s act could be seen as a glamorous rendition of the leading
role of the crucified Christ from the script of the gospels, passion plays,
and folk devotion, but also as a quite personal appropriation – almost
even an incarnation – of the suffering Christ. Her act could be seen as a
cheap moralistic call to ‘do like Jesus’, but also as an engaged populariza-
tion of contemporary theological readings of the crucifixion, followed
by a highly visible exemplary act of charity. It could be perceived as
a sincere attempt to revitalize the Christian symbol of crucifixion but
also as a shameless exploitation of this symbol by making a spectacle
of it. And, of course, it could be considered as sheer provocation, for it
is obvious that religion plays a major role in Madonna’s teasings and
provocations. To quote French literary critic Georges-Claude Guilbert,
who wrote a book on Madonna as ‘Postmodern Myth’:

Madonna, star, queen and divinity, but also sometimes scapegoat, is a

privileged source of scandal and mythology. ... Goddess and priestess
of her own cult, she (continuously) upsets the adepts of the more
traditional cults: Christians, Muslims and Jews. (Guilbert, 2002: 160)

Although I agree that Madonna constantly and deliberately shocks and

provokes to attract attention, I do not want to reduce her ingeniously
designed shows and compositions to this label. Nor do I consider her
236 Anne-Marie Korte

repertoire of religious themes a sheer manipulative toolbox. Provocation

I esteem part of her profession as an artist and performer. I am not inter-
ested in these provocations as such, but in the themes, forms, and media
Madonna actually uses to provoke and in the comments and reactions
they evoke.6 To address Madonna’s crucifixion performance in its
controversiality, I esteem an important element of a postsecular anal-
ysis. To approach this act from this perspective does not take away its
fundamental ambiguity nor its controversiality, but it opens a perspec-
tive of analysis that acknowledges this ambiguity and controversiality,
and reflects on this complexity without repeating and reinstalling the
modern opposition of secularism versus religion and the ways this oppo-
sition is interwoven with secular feminist as well as contemporary theo-
logical claims (cf. Asad, 2003; Taylor, 2007; Braidotti, 2008; Habermas,
2008; Casanova, 2009a; Göle, 2010). This reading, in particular, aims to
explain how critical appropriations of core religious images and practices
partake in emancipatory identity politics in postsecular conditions.

Female crucifixion as iconoclash

The actual transgression that determines the controversiality of reli-

giously embodied feminist works of art such as Madonna’s crucifixion
scene can be located on various levels of tension, depending on whom
or what is held most sacred and what is seen as most threatening to
violate this. From an intra-religious perspective, this transgression
consists of violating the interdiction of representation of the divine and
of trespassing against God as giver of this rule. Andreas Häger, a scholar
of religion who has studied the use of the image of the Christian cross
in Madonna’s earlier oeuvre, argues that judging this use to be blasphe-
mous does not depend on whether the cross is understood as a religious
symbol or not. According to Häger (1997), the judgement of blasphemy
is founded upon the idea that the (religious) symbol of crucifixion is
confined and closed in its actual form, content, and meaning (because
of its transcendent or God-given nature). The offence of blasphemy here
involved concerns the violation of established, authorized, and familiar
representation of the crucified Christ.
On a more general level of mythic conception and cultic practice, the
disputed status of these works of art is related to the problematic role
and meaning of gendered corporeality in the religious imagination of
the great monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). As
Christian feminist theology argues, where in these religions God is seen
as transcendent, sovereign, male, and not bound to material existence,
 Blasphemous Feminist Art 237

women are conceived to be totally ‘other’ than this God (cf. Ruether,
1983; Christ, 1987; Plaskow, 1991; Adler, 1999; Althaus-Reid, 2006).
So to connect female corporeality to the established symbols of divine
reality, in particular to the figure of Jesus as God incarnate, easily gener-
ates the judgement of blasphemy or sacrilege. From this perspective,
not individual acts of hubris or mockery but more general perceptions
and demarcations of what counts as sacred determine the perceived
offensiveness.
Thirdly, these accusations of blasphemy and sacrilege can be considered
as core disputes about religious identity and meaning in multicultural
and multi-religious societies, as clashes between various understandings
and imaginations of what is found to be sacred. Cultural philosopher
Bruno Latour has coined the term ‘iconoclash’ to address these situa-
tions, using a neologism that combines the aspects of clash and icono-
clasm. Iconoclash names an object, image, or situation that embodies
or creates an unsettled – and unsettling – clash between different scien-
tific, religious, and artistic world views. Characteristic of these icono-
clashes is that they create ambiguity and hesitation of interpretation,
because they counter images with images and combine aspects of image
breaking with those of image making (Latour, 2002). This concept of
iconoclash acknowledges the multi-directional transgressions taking
place in contemporary accusations of blasphemy and sacrilege, and it
considers them as manifestations and collisions of different but not
necessarily opposing or exclusive world views.
Against this background, Madonna’s crucifixion act becomes a very
interesting case to reflect on: what exactly effects transgression(s) here?
What is so problematic in Madonna’s staging of herself in the role of the
crucified Christ? By which aspects of her act does a symbol that counts as
sacred become ridiculed, affected, or obscured? Is this the central presence
of female corporeality, or the high-handed personal identification with
Jesus? Or is it the fact that the person who identifies with Jesus is Madonna,
the pop star and extremely successful businesswoman whom we, willingly
or unwillingly, associate with the provocative, sensualized, and eroticized
exhibition of her own body? In order to answer these questions in terms of
the specificity of Madonna’s performance, I first discuss two other exam-
ples of disputed female crucifixion in their own distinct contexts.

Female crucifixion in medieval devotional practices

As I have argued elsewhere in more detail, the visualization or staging

of female crucifixion has not per definition been judged blasphemous
238 Anne-Marie Korte

in Christian cultural history.7 On the contrary, the exposition of female

crucifixion has been incorporated into devotional practices over a long
period of time. The commemoration of crucified female saints and
martyrs, such as Blandina, Julia, or Eulalia, has been cultic practice
since early Christianity. However, indicative of the social and religious
tensions that female crucifixion harbours, there has been a continuous
reservation to portray these female saints as actually hanging on the
cross; the cross is mostly shown only as one of their attributes.8 A remark-
able exception to this iconographic tradition is the popular devotion
concerning a female crucified saint, depicted as such, that existed all
over in Europe from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century (cf. Friesen,
2001, 2007; Nightlinger, 1993; Schweizer-Vüllers, 1997; Zänker, 1998). A
long-standing explanation of the existence of these extraordinary visu-
alizations speaks of a misunderstanding: the crucified saint portrayed
could not have been a woman, because it was Jesus, depicted in the
majestic style of Eastern Christianity. This tradition perceived Jesus on
the cross in the role of the divinely ordained High Priest, fully and richly
dressed. From the twelfth century onwards this image of the royally
dressed, crucified Christ was venerated in Western Christianity, along-
side the upcoming Gothic depiction of the almost naked suffering Christ
(Belting, 1981). The adoration of the so-called ‘robed Christ’ existed, in
particular, in connection to the famous sculpture of the Volto Santo (Holy
Face) or Sante Croce (Holy Cross) in the Cathedral of Lucca in Tuscany,
which became a famous place of pilgrimage (Lazzarini, 1982). According
to the misunderstanding thesis, the many copies of this image that were
created and spread over the centuries were not interpreted any longer
as signifying Jesus with his symbols of sacred kingship and royal priest-
hood. The particular details of this image, such as the precious robe,
the ornaments, the crown, and the shoes contributed to the growing
idea that the statue was, in fact, that of a woman rather than of Jesus
(Schnürer and Ritz, 1934).
But more interesting than this misunderstanding thesis is the ques-
tion: why and how did the practice of veneration of a crucified female
saint become so important and accepted that even an established and
popular image of the crucified Christ could be taken to be representative
of her? This interpretive shift took place in the bedding of the cultural
and religious transition towards a lower Christology and a more personal
devotion to Jesus and the saints in the late Middle Ages, following the
radical religious reform movements of the mendicant orders in the thir-
teenth century. In this context, the triumphal nature of the earlier cruci-
fixes, which had reflected the conviction that the crucifixion necessarily
 Blasphemous Feminist Art 239

implied Jesus’s resurrection, increasingly gave way to a more pessimistic

vision of human nature and existence, and this changed the religious
interpretation of suffering and death considerably. Jesus became pref-
erably depicted as suffering, bleeding, and dying on the cross, which
rendered him more human and more connected to ordinary human
existence. As church historian Caroline Walker Bynum has shown, this
implied that in the late Middle Ages women could identify themselves
more directly with the suffering Christ, and, vice versa, that Jesus could
be perceived as being more close to women, in particular in his human
aspects of suffering, bleeding, and dying to further new, eternal life (cf.
Friesen, 2001; Gibson, 1992; Beckwith, 1993; Newman, 1995).
The fact that the visual presence of female crucifixion was widely
accepted in late medieval Europe – until it was swept away in the broad
iconoclastic gesture of the Reformation – probably was related to the
profound gender ambiguity and the gender bending that characterized
its depictions. They point to the redemptive significance of female cruci-
fixion and the gender inclusiveness of divine incarnation in Jesus – not
overtly or provocatively but in a rather subtle and ambiguous way. The
agony and cruel death of the female saint are implied but not overtly
shown, which offers an affective and imaginative space to call up the
suffering of the saint, of Jesus, as well as that of the believers. And the
richly dressed and adorned crucified body refers simultaneously to female-
ness and to maleness, to the suffering Christ as well as to the risen Christ.
This gendered ambiguity apparently did not diminish, but rather empha-
sized and reinforced the sacred dimensions of the crucified Christ.

Female crucifixion as twentieth-century feminist iconoclasm

The last quarter of the twentieth century has seen the rise of so-called
Christa sculptures and paintings, made in the context of women’s polit-
ical, cultural, and religious emancipation in Western countries. These
works, created individually by female artists, each aim to present the
crucified Christ in a female form. Famous examples are the bronze
sculpture Christa by the American Edwina Sandys (1974),9 the bronze
sculpture Crucified Woman by the Canadian Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey
(1976),10 and the three-dimensional panel Bosnian Christa by the British
Margaret Argyle (1993).11 These sculptures were not made as, or intended
to be, religious works of art in the sense of objects of devotion or medi-
tation, nor were they meant to be installed or handled in religious
settings. They reflect, according to their makers, a creative reworking of
the central sacred symbol of Christianity, the crucifixion of Jesus.
240 Anne-Marie Korte

One of these artists, Margaret Argyle, has stated that she sees this
female Christ as a symbol that addresses the situation of Bosnian women
during the ethnical cleansings and civil war in former Yugoslavia in the
early 1990s of the twentieth century: ‘A Christa which would speak
about the obscenity of rape clearly and graphically.’12 The suffering
woman on the cross Argyle created re-awakened for her the symbolic
meaning of the cross of Jesus and of the faith in God, who is in the
world and is present wherever a human being suffers. Her panel refers
to the specific suffering of women during the conflicts and slaughters
in former Yugoslavia, while at the same time it suggests the idea of the
Christian cross guarding the vulva and prohibiting the violation of
women’s bodies.
These Christas all gave rise to similar reactions of indignation, illus-
trated here by considering the vicissitudes of Sandys’s Christa in more
detail (for detailed information on this case, cf. Clague, 2005b). This
sculpture, created in 1974 by an artist known for her monumental
works, is rather small and reserved. It shows a slender female nude
with arms outstretched in cruciform and with a crown of thorns on her
bent head. It was the first of the works of art mentioned here that was
publicly exposed. But it only became perceived and disputed as contro-
versial when it was exhibited, ten years after its creation, in a Christian
ecclesiastical and liturgical setting. In 1984, it was placed near the main
altar in the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City
during Holy Week. The display of the sculpture in this context evoked
very emotional stances pro and contra, expressed by church leaders
and publicists on both sides of the debate. The opponents declared that
the sculpture, by showing a naked suffering woman on the cross, was
‘symbolically reprehensible’ and ‘theologically and historically indefen-
sible’ (Briggs, 1984), while the defending party argued that the sculp-
ture revealed in a confronting way the inclusiveness and depth of the
theological meaning of God’s incarnation in Jesus (Farrell, 1985).13 After
11 days, the sculpture had to be removed from the Cathedral due to
ongoing protests. When six months later the sculpture was displayed
at the Memorial Chapel of Stanford University in California, the same
mixed reactions occurred.
In the reactions to the public exposition of these Christas, two
aspects are remarkable. Firstly, these three works of art only became
contested when they were put in ecclesiastical and liturgical settings,
as has happened several times with all these works of art. They were
not disputed while displayed in other public spaces like museums or
galleries. Only in these religious settings, when the Christas entered the
 Blasphemous Feminist Art 241

sacred space of collective Christian remembrance and imagination, they

became forms of iconoclash. Secondly, in this context, these contested
works of art proved to be capable of bringing about theological debate
on the meaning of one of the central tenets of Christian faith: God
becoming human and fully participating in humanity’s existence and
suffering. For by suggesting similarity and comparability between the
suffering of women and the crucifixion of Jesus, the Christas more or
less deliberately put a gender-critical strain on the familiar meanings
of this symbol. This strain can be interpreted as a threat of erasure and
destruction, but also as an invitation to reconsider and re-appropriate
the meaning of this central symbol of Christianity.14
I would suggest that one of the reasons why these works of art did
not only bring about shock and aversion but also generated incentives
to theological debate and reflection lies in the particular gender aspects
of these visualizations of female crucifixion. The Christas clearly show
the naked body of a woman, but in all cases this body is very restrained
and tenuously stylized in the characteristic pose of a crucifixion. The
difference between these thin female bodies and that of the commonly
depicted naked suffering Christ on the cross is minimal. Pictured this
way, the crucified female body has a great figural likeness to the suffering
body of Jesus, and in this fusion of images the naked crucified bodies
of women seem to transcend their primarily sexual connotation. The
sacred, solemn, and non-sexual associations summoned by the suffering
body of Jesus can counter or absorb the ambivalent reactions that are
commonly evoked by the exposure of the naked bodies of women. Here
the maleness of the traditional crucifixion symbol is contested by an act
of feminist iconoclasm that does not replace the male figure with the
female figure but blurs the established distinction between them. This
specific constellation of images has supported the acceptance of these
Christas and generated the rise of the Christa as a theme in works of art
all over the world during the past two decades.

Madonna’s crucifixion act reconsidered

Madonna’s 2006 crucifixion scene was staged as part of a show, in the

form of a play, and as an artistic expression. What needs to be evaluated
is the way she staged and enacted the theme of female crucifixion and
the effects that her artistic choices produced. One possible proceeding of
such an evaluation I have developed in the foregoing parts of this contri-
bution. That is why now, to conclude, I will look at the gender strategy
of Madonna’s crucifixion scene and its effects compared with those
242 Anne-Marie Korte

found in the two other contested cases of female crucifixion that I have
discussed above. At first sight, looking at Madonna’s crucifixion scene as
actually performed on stage, we can notice a striking resemblance to the
staging of gendered corporeality in the medieval devotional practices
regarding female crucifixion. Madonna, surprisingly, has left out all her
usual provocations while taking on the role of the crucified Christ: she
does not take off her clothes in this scene, and she is not provocatively
dressed either. Rather, she shows herself on the cross in a very modest,
androgynous style, fully dressed with a blouse, trousers and boots. The
modesty and serenity Madonna displays resemble the gender ambiguity
and the gender bending of the medieval devotional paintings of Saint
Uncumber. Madonna, embodying the crucified Christ discretely within
an energetic show composed of passionate confessions of herself and
her dancers, comes closest to ‘the spiritual transmutation of the life of
the body’ that Luce Irigaray ascribes to Jesus as ‘human totem’: ‘a bridge
between totemic cultures and patriarchal cultures, the cultures of life
and the cultures of the mind, confused by the patriarchy with the Word’
(Irigaray and Burke, 2007: 362).
But looking at Madonna’s crucifixion scene while taking into account
Madonna’s openly stated intentions of this act, it seems that the staging
of her act resembles more strongly the restrained feminist criticism of
the makers of the Christas. Like them, Madonna strives for a critical
appropriation of the symbol of crucifixion as a protest against injustice,
violence, and suffering, in particular the suffering caused by AIDS that
often is not noticed or tends to be forgotten. Like the Christa artists,
Madonna fuses the symbol of the suffering Christ with the figure of a
not-too-corporal woman to put a gender-critical strain on the familiar
meanings of this symbol. And like these artists, Madonna has restaged
the crucifixion scene with references to contemporary situations of
suffering and injustice. In Madonna’s crucifixion act, abandoned
mourning women – Jesus’s mother and his female friends – are not below
and behind the cross, as in classical Christian iconography, but instead
the faces of abandoned mournful children, who are orphans and victims
of AIDS, fill in these spaces.
It is possible, considering Madonna’s staging of the crucifixion scene
and in view of her intentions, to interpret this performance theologically
as a contemporary, gender-inclusive representation of Jesus’s suffering. In
doing so, we may value this act as an affirmation of the agenda of femi-
nist and liberation theology, as has been suggested by some theologians
(Häger, 1997; Thienen, 2007). However, although the Christas indeed
evoked a theological impetus like that, it is doubtful if Madonna’s act
 Blasphemous Feminist Art 243

could ever bring about a similar effect. In the case of Madonna, provoca-
tion dominates the scene: Madonna’s objective clearly is to advance the
iconoclash itself, not to contribute to its effacement.
But leaving aside Madonna’s more or less outspoken intentions, I
maintain that the form and style of her act qua gender strategy enhances
the controversiality of female crucifixion. For, finally, I think that
Madonna’s staging of the crucifixion scene resembles most the works of
the female artists and performers who explicitly pose themselves as Jesus
or Mary in their works of art: Renée Cox, Alma López, and Katarzyna
Kozyra, whose works gave rise to huge controversies and insurmountable
conflicts. The presentia realis, the real, ineluctable presence of women of
flesh and blood in these works of art, intensifies the iconoclash between
sacred symbol and female corporeality and sexuality.15
Probably here the most challenging tension of Madonna’s crucifixion
act can be identified, which also clarifies why this act has come to play a
crucial role in contemporary identity political clashes. On the one hand,
Madonna’s performance is highly susceptible to accusations of hubris
and blasphemy, neither because of the presence of female corporeality
per se, nor because of the fact that a female crucifixion as such is staged,
but because Madonna poses as a recognizable individual and a woman
of stature and fame who intentionally stands for and in the place of
Jesus. On the other hand, Madonna’s act is also in an unexpected way
intriguing because of her personal, ‘lived’, and confessed identification
with the crucified, suffering Christ. An uncanny admixture of secular
and religious values is demonstrated here. By putting on a fragile and
broken body, Madonna seems to have acknowledged that the visceral
and vulnerable body is both a potent signifier of lived experience and a
medium of formal and aesthetic inquiry – which brings her on speaking
terms with old traditions of ‘spiritual exercise’ in Christian devotional
practices and imagination. More generally spoken, her act attests to
the fact that in postsecular conditions the individual body’s role as a
challenge to constricting social codes has increased, while the gendered
and sexuate body simultaneously has become profiled as the principal
arena for the politics of identity, as well as a facilitator and marker of
belonging.

Notes
1. For comprehensive and critical overviews of contemporary art accused of
blasphemy see Brent Plate (2006); Coleman, and White (2006); Coleman and
Fernandes Dias (2008); Verrips (2008); Heartney (2011).
244 Anne-Marie Korte

2. For discussions of blasphemy and sacrilege in their contemporary forms see

also Lawton (1993); Levy (1993); Fisher and Ramsay (2000); Nash (2007);Wils
(2007); Coleman (2011).
3. To analyse Madonna’s crucifixion scene I have followed the threefold
approach of cultural phenomena in the context of theological evaluation
as proposed by Lynch (2005): an author-focused approach (researching the
scene in relation to Madonna’s life, oeuvre, and published intentions), an
object-focused approach (research into the visual and symbolic specificity
of this scene), and a reception-orientated approach (investigation of the
reactions and comments the scene has evoked). See also Korte (2009, 2010,
2011).
4. Media reactions to Madonna’s performance as described and commented on
in this paragraph have been gathered from national and international news-
papers and the Internet from the period of June to December 2006.
5. See note above.
6. For critical analyses of Madonna’s life and works see a.o. Schwichtenberg
(1993); Grigat (1995); Dresen (1998); Fouz-Hernández and Jarman-Ivens
(2004).
7. See note 5.
8. See for instance the portrayal of Margaret of Antioch (died AD 305) (Lanzi
and Lanzi, 2004: 92).
9. Edwina Sandys, Christa, bronze sculpture (54” x 40” x 8”), 1974.
10. Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey, Crucified Woman, bronze sculpture (8 feet tall),
1976.
11. Margaret Argyle, Bosnian Christa, mixed textile panel (48” x 29”), 1993.
12. Clague (1995) ‘Interview with Margaret Argyle’, Feminist Theology 10(1), 58.
13. See also ‘Reflections on the Christa’ (1985) Journal of Women and Religion,
Special Issue, 4(2).
14. For more in-depth feminist-theological discussion of these works of art, see
also Clague (2005); Strahm Bernet (1991); Meyer (1997); Raab (1997).
15. For extended discussions of these works of art in this context see my earlier
publications in note 5.

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13
Conclusion: The Residual Spirituality in
Critical Theory: A Case for Affirmative
Postsecular Politics
Rosi Braidotti

Introduction

The highly politicized context in which issues linked to religion in the

public sphere are being discussed, in Europe and elsewhere in the world
today, raises a number of questions that go beyond the study of religion
itself. Throughout this volume, the issue of the postsecular has been
addressed as one of the defining features of the material and discursive
conditions that structure our social context. The starting assumption for
this volume was the determination to disrupt the dominant equation
between Christianity and secularism, so as to open up new spaces for
critical theory. Stathis Gourgouris put it admirably: ‘the ultimate point
is not merely to disrupt the antinomic complicity between the religious
and the secular, but to take away from the religious the agency of deter-
mining what is secular’ (Gourgouris, 2013: 62).
While the general focus of this volume is on this particular challenge,
the contributors have been encouraged to roam freely and address
this issue from a range of transdisciplinary fields and methods. In this
process, they have constructed several relevant and multifaceted inter-
sections of the postsecular condition.
The nodal points of the book are: firstly, the manipulative framing of
debates on secularism by conservative and populist political forces in the
European Union today, in terms of the cultural and philosophical legacy
of Christianity and the Western project of modernity (Hemel; Sørensen;
Lentin and Titley); secondly, the repercussions of these political and
social movements for the terminology and the agenda of contemporary
philosophical debates (Lambert; Baumgartner; Egginton; Braidotti); and

249
250 Rosi Braidotti

thirdly, the implications of this politically loaded context for the status
of women and LGBT people (Midden; Korte) and for contemporary neo-
and postcolonial geopolitical relations, including their socio-economic
and technological aspects (Eisenlohr; Klassen; Leurs and Ponzanesi).
These are not merely single and isolated thematic cross references;
they compose a multi-dimensional web of dynamically linked social
and discursive effects. The volume does not aim to provide even a
synoptic view, let alone a synthesis, of these complex phenomena. What
we have attempted instead is a cartographic account of their multiple
and subtle resonances and of their mutual reinforcement through the
reiteration of common themes, tropes, and concerns. The shared belief
in the materiality of a complex historical event we call ‘the postsecular
predicament’ therefore does not detract from, but rather constitutes,
the core of this volume’s theoretical complexity. As the essays gathered
here clearly demonstrate, whatever the postsecular predicament may or
may not be – and the positions on this question differ considerably – it
nonetheless touches some raw nerves in the theory and practice of crit-
ical thought. The volume focuses on the strength and relevance of the
postsecular moment and its impact upon ethical and political citizen-
ship in the twenty-first century. The authors propose a range of critical
responses and political reactions to the web of complex social relations
that constitute ‘the postsecular predicament’ and thus contribute to a
more sharply defined and socially responsible agenda on this issue. In
this volume, the political critique of a Eurocentric and Western suprema-
cist ideology of coercive secularism – as intrinsically linked to religion
by negation – works in tandem with a rigorous scientific investigation
of the renewed vitality of the theme of religion in the public sphere. In
this intense collective endeavour, critique and creativity reinforce and
co-define each other.
Given that the volume deals so extensively with the complex and
multi-layered phenomenon that is the postsecular predicament, far from
attempting to resolve or dissolve this complexity, I think the next step
needs to take the argument further by connecting it to the issue of post-
secular subjectivity. The key question I want to discuss consequently is:
how does the project of critical theory and the ethical drive that sustains
it relate to the postsecular predicament? What kind of subject need one
be, in order to actively desire to undertake the demands and expecta-
tions of critical theory in a postsecular context? I do not mean to refer
back to moral intentionality or rational choice, but rather to explore
and deploy the question affectively and ethically in terms of process-
oriented nomadic subjectivity.
 Conclusion 251

My starting assumption is twofold: firstly, there is a strong sense of

socio-political urgency about the postsecular predicament. Secondly,
this complex phenomenon constitutes the backdrop against which
I want to defend an affirmative politics, resting on a vital materialist
vision of subjectivity. It is precisely because they touch such raw nerves
in people’s sense of identity and identification that critical theories of
the subject are so important in a postsecular age. Contemporary subjects
have to confront the complex challenges of living in a fast-changing,
globally interlinked, technologically mediated world. We need to let go
of the familiar while resisting the pull of fear, anxiety, and nostalgia that
come with departing from set habits and known mental landscapes. We
need to learn to think differently about what kind of subjects we are in
the process of becoming.
In this postface, I will take the unusual step of developing a personal
position on the issue of the residual spirituality of critical theory through
the analysis of postsecular subjectivity. I want to argue for a vision of
consciousness that links thinking to affectivity, critique to affirma-
tion instead of negativity, and that does not hesitate to show traces
of residual – albeit it non-theistic – spirituality. The conceptual punch
of something we may call the postsecular turn consists in the notion
that agency, or political subjectivity, is not mutually exclusive with
spiritual values and that civic engagement as well as militant activism
may involve significant amounts of spirituality. For as long as I believe
in civic values such as justice, freedom, equality, and democratic criti-
cism, I can be said to be a believer, albeit of the non-theistic kind. This
provocative statement has an important corollary – namely that polit-
ical agency need not be critical in the negative sense of oppositional
and it need not rely on a dialectical scheme of production of counter-
subjectivities. This leads me to put the case for affirmative politics and
to suggest that subjectivity is a monistic-process ontology of embodied
and embedded – and hence situated – practices, through autopoiesis or
self-styling. This view of the subject involves complex and continuous
negotiations with others – human and non-human – and it therefore
entails multiple forms of ethical accountability. We are confronted with
a double challenge: firstly, we need to disengage subjectivity both from
oppositional consciousness and from critique defined as negativity.
Secondly, subjectivity needs to be linked to affects, to the imagination
and transformative becoming, in ways that are perfectly compatible
with postsecular spirituality.
Why can this argument be taken as provocative? Because a sort of
secularist consensus has forged the practice of critical theory, installing a
252 Rosi Braidotti

number of criteria and rules of intellectual behaviour that in due course

have become set habits and canonical procedures. They rest on the anti-
nomy reason-emotions, that is to say thinking-believing, which trans-
lates into other binary subsets: rational arguments versus acts of faith;
public activity versus private beliefs; socio-political citizenship versus
spiritual rituals; material versus spiritual; and, by extension, critical
theory versus irrational factors such as spirituality (Asad et al., 2009).
The feminist movement was historically the first to seriously chal-
lenge the public-private distinction by proclaiming that the personal
is the political. Feminists have also shown both the power structures
that frame the separation of the public from the private and the many
discrepancies and contradictions that characterize it. Feminism has a
long and rich genealogy in terms of pleading for creative alternatives.
From the very early days, Joan Kelly (1979) typified feminist theory as
a double-edged vision, with a strong critical function and an equally
strong creative function. Faith in the creative powers of the imagination
is an integral part of feminists’ appraisal of embodiment and the bodily
roots of subjectivity.
The question of the public-private distinction raises also the issue of
citizenship and of the role of women in the social contract (Pateman,
1988); it lies at the core of what Joan Scott has aptly labelled: ‘sex-ularism’
(Scott, 2007). The latter refers to the co-option of feminist and eman-
cipatory politics into the neo-nationalist discourse of contemporary
populist movements which claim exclusive rights to the legacy of
Enlightenment secularism. In this respect, feminist theory and politics
today cannot avoid a head-on collision with the very secularism that
has historically been its point of reference (Braidotti, 2008). Mindful
of this critical legacy, I want to argue that the postsecular predicament
invites and somehow demands a reappraisal of the role of affective and
even spiritual values at the core of the analytical tasks of critical theory.
Let me develop this argument.

Vital materialism, affect, ontology

The residual spirituality at work in critical theory is best expressed in

contemporary vital materialist thought (Braidotti, 2006, 2013) and in
the ‘affective turn’ (Clough, 2008). They foreground the political impact
of processes of becoming, defined as materially grounded transforma-
tive acts that reflect both the ontological relationality of the human
subject and the social complexity of our network societies (Braidotti,
2011b). The return to vitalism, redefined through machinic autopoieses
 Conclusion 253

(Guattari, 1995), supplements the bio-political analysis of the age of

intelligent machines (De Landa, 2002) and enables more accurate
accounts of contemporary power in terms of vital politics.
This switch to vitalism is itself a symptom of the postsecular turn in
political theory. Whereas classical vitalism is a flawed holistic notion,
which became historically linked to the organicist philosophies of
European fascism, contemporary vitalism is a philosophy of relations,
flows, and assemblages. It moves beyond the fixity, the Eurocentric
racism, and the sacralization of Life of nineteenth-century vitalism.1
Vital materialism presupposes and builds upon the philosophical
monism that is central to a relational and non-unitary vision of subjec-
tivity (Ansell Pearson, 1999; Grosz, 2004; Protevi, 2009; Patton, 2000;
Braidotti, 2011a).
The core notion in both vital materialism and the affective turn is
the autonomy of affect itself (Massumi, 2002). Psychoanalytic theory
introduced this insight last century through the notion of desire and
the primacy of unconscious processes. Lacan developed this into a full-
fledged theory of the subject as built by Lack and Law. The psychoan-
alytic vision stresses that the subject is split, or ‘di-vidual’, and what
divides it – but also constitutes it – is the linguistic signifier. Language as
the mediator between self and the natural and social environment func-
tions like a third party that separates the human subjects from the condi-
tions that engendered them in the first place, namely the ‘other’. In a
patriarchal system, this ‘other’ is embodied and embedded institution-
ally in the maternal body. The task of splitting the native mother-child
dyad is fulfilled by the Father. Therefore, the phallic Law-of-the-Father is
not only the abstract master code of language, but also the key symbolic
political rule in our social system, according to the isomorphism between
the psychic and the social realms, which is central to psychoanalytic
theory. The linguistic branch of poststructuralism sees language as the
phallogocentric system (Derrida, 1978) and as the trace of an ‘other’
within (Kristeva, 1991), while its feminist critics see it as the master code
of phallic patriarchal power (Irigaray, 1985; Cixous, 1976).
The political economy of domination and exclusion, which is institu-
tionalized in language as a socio-symbolic system adds an extra dimen-
sion to the psychoanalytic vision of the ‘di-vidual’ subject. If language is
both an ontological precondition and an ethical interpellation, then we
are faced here with a seeming contradictory statement: that language,
as an ontological a priori, is external to the self, but it is also a constant
presence at the heart of the self, thereby inscribing the relation to others
as the defining feature of our common humanity. In the linguistic turn
254 Rosi Braidotti

tradition, this is taken as a productive double bind: language has no

object other than itself, but in so far as it is always tied to others, it is
already quite a crowd. The writers – philosophers, critics, and poets –
have the obligation to deploy the analytical premises of language itself
and to labour to share them with the readers. As Maurice Blanchot
(2000) argued, dealing with language, in theoretical or poetical writing,
entails the visualization of ethical relationality. In other words, the use
of language in writing critical theory is a secular activity imbued with
spirituality in so far as it both evokes and approximates the presence of
the other.
These insights need to be read within the firmly secular structure of
psychoanalytic thought. Psychoanalysis is a non-theological account of
desire, passion, and affect, based on the Law of the Father and on the
constitutive role of Lack. In this respect, Lacan differs from Freud who,
as a champion of atheism and anti-clericalism, provided one of the most
scathing analyses of the psychic function of religion in The Future of an
Illusion (1927). The psychoanalytic approach consists in emphasizing
the pathological aspects of the religious attitude, which is delusional at
heart. Significantly, Freud includes a blind faith in the powers of scien-
tific reason among these pathological formations and warns the scien-
tific community against it. Diehard champions of atheism, like Dawkins
(2006), would do well to heed this warning.
Linguistically based psychoanalysis recognizes the importance of
affect but codes it negatively and defines the task of thinking as to both
the yearning for and the mourning of the death of the Father as socio-
symbolic carrier of Lack and Law. Psychoanalysis acknowledges both the
constitutive and the unfulfillable character of the ethical demand made
by the other which is inscribed as the heart of the split subject. The
Law – both psychic and social – as well as psychoanalytic ethics consist
in accepting this presence, while honouring the subject’s unconscious
desire. Ultimately, the psychoanalytic affect consists in enacting the
destitution of the unitary subject and the end of the totality of truth and
meaning, while acknowledging the enduring power of our individual
and collective yearning for the very totality we lost.
The non-theistic spirituality of psychoanalytic theory is developed
in interesting directions by Simon Critchley (1999, 2012, 2013) who
combines it with the philosophical work of Levinas (1969) and Derrida
(2002). Building on their insights, Critchley argues that the subject is
constitutionally split by the ethical demand by the other, which it can
never fully meet. This ‘demand’ is an ethical interpellation that exceeds
the subject’s ability to fulfil it and yet constructs the subject around this
 Conclusion 255

impossibility. Critchley consequently stresses the importance of subject

formation through negativity, not affinity or wonder. He believes in the
relational nature of the subject but defines it in terms of the structural
and constitutive function of the relationship to otherness. By exten-
sion he takes a stand against the ontology of vital politics, to which he
opposes a pragmatic relationship to the real, messy world that calls both
for oppositional politics and for the healing power of love.
There are significant differences between contemporary manifestations
of affective relational ethics that continue to rely on social constructivist
methods and monistic vitalism. Whereas a social constructivist approach
within the linguistic turn tradition responds to this analysis opposition-
ally – in the case of Critchley, by returning to Gramsci (2012); in the case
of Butler (2004), by appealing to Levinasian-inspired ethics; in the case
of Derrida (1978), by advocating the open-ended and relational structure
of language itself – vital materialism takes a different route. The nomadic
subject is not linguistically ordained and therefore not subjected to the
normative rules of Law and Lack. It rather expresses the vital, generative
force of desire as the ontological drive by intelligent matter to express itself
in as manifold a manner as it can sustain at any given point in space and
time. Vital materialism is a practice of negotiations with the negative and
of affirmation, not of negativity, and this fatal attraction for the positive
constitutes not only its core ethical value but also its political ontology.
Under the impact of Spinozist monism, a different emphasis has been
placed on the affective elements of human subjectivity under advanced
capitalism and on the process of political subject formation. Rejecting
the Lacanian conceptual structure and terminology, vital materialist
thinkers stress the generative importance of affects and connect them
to a positive view of desire as plenitude, not as Lack (Braidotti, 2006).
The unconscious affects and drives, instead of being played back upon
a sort of negative filter linked to the ‘black box’ of desire as Lack with
its corollary of negative passions like envy, resentment, and perennial
frustration, are approached affirmatively. Affects are the autonomous
visceral elements of our allegedly rational and discursive belief system
(Connolly, 1999). What they express is the profoundly relational nature
of human subjectivity and its constitutive drive for the freedom of
expression of its powers (potentia).
Vital materialism expresses the postsecular predicament in that it
stresses a spiritual sense of intimacy with the world and a sense of entan-
glement in a web of ever-shifting relations and perpetual becoming.
Bataille’s agnostic spirituality is of great inspiration for nomadic
thought in that it leads to a non-theistic form of naturalism that rejects
256 Rosi Braidotti

all transcendental mystifications (Bataille, 1988). Mary Bryden calls it:

‘a dynamism of the void’ (Bryden, 2001: 5), which generates alterna-
tive visions of how matter and mind interact. Intimacy with the world
speaks of our ability to recollect it and reconnect to it and hence of
our capacity to find our ‘homes’ within it, in the pursuit of nomadic
sustainable relations (Braidotti, 2006). Relational nomadic subjects
engage in transversal connections – Haraway speaks of ‘becoming-with’
(Haraway, 2007) – multiple human and non-human others. Such webs
of connections and negotiations define belonging not as attachment
to static identity lines but as dynamic transversal moves across eco-
sophically interconnected categories. Relationality consists of a deep
sense of negotiations with multiple ecologies – social, environmental,
and psychic (Guattari, 1995) – that constitute us. A sense of familiarity
with the world flows from the simple fact that we are the products of
such ecological interconnections and notably of the nature-culture
continuum (Haraway, 1997) that marks our era.
Theoretically and politically, vital materialism stands against the
emphasis on political theology that, adapted from Carl Schmitt (1996),
shaped the thinking of Leo Strauss and the American neo-cons through
the Bush Jr years (Norton, 2004). The difference between the two
approaches is that political theology in its classical enunciation as well
as in the contemporary reinterpretation by Agamben (1998) reduces
modern political theories to the secularized version of theological
concepts. This fundamentally authoritarian reduction overemphasizes
the ruthlessly dichotomous (‘friend or enemy’) and polarizing nature
(‘you are with us or against us’) of the political relation. By stressing the
antagonistic dimension as the defining core of politics (Mouffe, 2005),
this theory ends up endorsing negativity and the necessity of violence.
It also expresses an indictment of Western modernity and the demo-
cratic process as being structurally flawed.
Materialist vital ethics, on the other hand, while being resolutely athe-
istic, is ontologically pacifist. Deleuze’s notion of the univocity of being
and the immanence of matter is a vitalist anti-theology. Starting from
the recognition of our intimacy with the world, it defends this claim on
conceptual grounds by reference to a non-unitary subject immersed in
the intelligent and self-organizing structure of life itself. It, therefore,
infuses affect and endurance at the heart of its definition of materialism
and of matter itself as a nature-culture continuum. The proposed meth-
odology is not social constructivism, but rather neo-Spinozist expres-
sionism (Braidotti, 2013). That is to say that events, phenomena, and
subject formations are approached as actualizations of differential modes
 Conclusion 257

of becoming within a monistic universe. The univocity of being means

that we have to deal with one matter, which is intelligent, embedded,
embodied, and affective. It requires a subtler analysis of differential vari-
ations in the process of subjectivation in order to account for the actu-
alization of transversal subject formations, also known as ‘assemblages’
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).
The Deleuzian position shares the same commitment to overturning
the dialectical model of intersubjectivity as the linguistic tradition of
semiotic, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction but takes a different road.
It assumes the de-familiarization or relative de-territorialization of estab-
lished values and habits of thought as a starting point to explore and
experiment with alternative forms of subjectivity. This qualitative shift
engages our collective imaginings (Lloyd and Gatens, 1999) and desire
(Braidotti, 2011b) – in response to world-historical structural transfor-
mations. The nomadic subject is a materially embodied and historically
embedded ‘di-vidual’ in that it is a bound instantiation of a common
and ever-shifting matter. Each singular self is an actualized and tempo-
rarily bound expression of the ongoing process of becoming. Matter is
intelligent and self-organizing; specific forms of individuation are carved
out of this vital material, according to the monistic vision of matter. In
the specific case of the human organism, it implies the embrainment of
the body as well as the embodiment of the mind (Marks, 1998). It is a
materialist non-theistic vital philosophy.
Spinoza is not the only philosopher Deleuze and Guattari enlist to
the task of defining vital materialism. Nietzsche, Bergson, and Leibnitz
also play a role as well as writers like Artaud, Melville, Kafka, Woolf, and
Beckett. They are approached as spiritual thinkers of matter in that they
combine a shared awareness of the death of God with renewed trust in
‘the rebirth of immanence’ (Ansell Pearson, 2001: 141). This entails a
spiritual affirmation of joy, or life, as creation.
The renewed emphasis on immanence and on monism or the univocity
of being is an affirmative response to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death
of God. In a move that Dan Smith (2001) assesses as the most anti-Heideg-
gerian moment in Deleuze’s thought, vital materialist philosophy rejects
the onto-theological paradigm (which, on the other hand, continues to
haunt Derrida). Linking this move to the critique of the Lacanian notion
of the Law as Lack, Deleuze and Guattari (1997) announce and explore
the implications of the end of the judgement of God, the demise of the
despotic power of the signifier, and the Oedipalized terror it exercises.
They replace it with the joyful assertion of disobedience, anti-Oedipal
disloyalty to the master, and lines of flight toward becoming-nomadic.
258 Rosi Braidotti

We have here two radically different postsecular scenarios and two

opposite views as to what constitutes the spiritual roots of this predica-
ment and their political relevance. They differ considerably: I see the
ethical vision of Otherness proposed by Levinas and Derrida as melan-
choly, fatalistic, and passive. Critchley’s celebration of the aporetic as
the political moment is, in my eyes, unethical, disguising its profound
pessimism behind a thin veneer of tragic affectivity. Nomadic theory
prefers to produce energizing affects and to look instead for the ways in
which otherness prompts, mobilizes, and allows for flows of affirmation
of values and forces which are not yet sustained by the current condi-
tions. Critchley’s position is moreover uncritically anthropocentric and
closes off all relations to the non-human environment. Nomadic ethics,
on the other hand, includes zoe-centred relations to external and non-
human forces: cells (Franklin, 2007), viruses and bacteria (Parisi, 2004),
and the planet as a whole (Haraway, 2007). All differences notwith-
standing, however, we do also have a consensus about the relevance of a
non-theistic spiritual dimension in critical theory and on its ethical and
affective implications.
Another significant point of contrast between the two traditions of
thought concerns the crucial importance of the imaginary (that is to
say, of narrative and representations of social and cultural construc-
tions), especially the emotional and visual impact of totemic and iconic
figures as fundamental structures of psychic order and social cohesion.
This emphasis on the imaginary rests conceptually on the isomorphism
between psychic and social structures, which in Lacanian psychoanal-
ysis, as I argued before, are equally subjected to the rule of the Master
signifier and of desire as Lack.
Psychoanalysis offers important insights into the crucial role played
by the social imaginary and its unconscious interpellations. It does
so, however, within a social constructivist approach that privileges
the structural importance of the social and psychic codes that imple-
ment the phallic Law. Thus, imaginary representations fulfil both a
psychic and a social function, fuelling the powers of identification with
dominant icons. If in the past these icons were religious in origin and
function, today they are dominated by popular culture images and by
political figures, ranging from the ubiquitous face of Che Guevara or the
young Angela Davis, to the images of Nelson Mandela and other secular
saints like Princess Diana. These iconic representations fulfil a totemic
function in the sacrificial sense of the term: ‘they suffered so that we
may be better off’. The irrational and even ‘mystical’ elements of mass
popular culture have been commented upon – mostly negatively – by
 Conclusion 259

critical theorists as diverse as Adorno and Horkheimer, and Deleuze

and Guattari. Contemporary digital techno-culture has intensified this
trend, encouraging viral links between visual culture, the faces of global
icons, and a postsecular social imaginary that fetishizes them into the
‘sacred monsters’ of global consumption. An opportunistic and profit-
driven pseudo-spirituality is therefore integrated into the cultural logic
of advanced capitalism. It is marketed by visually driven popular culture,
which both sacralizes and cannibalizes a fast turnover of icons.
Deleuze goes further than psychoanalysis and offers a different theory
of the social imaginary, arguing productively against the primacy of
linguistic process of signification. The imaginary is not the emanation
of a symbolic system that allegedly structures both our psychic and
our social existence, but rather the material implementation of social
relations of power. Accordingly, Levinas’s emphasis on transcendence
and on the face as the ethical boundary of the other (Levinas, 1999) is
explicitly critiqued by Deleuze and Guattari. The face is for nomadic
thought a decoding and over-coding machine fully inscribed in the
market economy and in despotic power relations. Faces produce repre-
sentational codes and practices – a surplus value function which Deleuze
analyses in terms of the immanence of power and the notion of ‘facial-
ity’2 (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). This function is made manifest in the
market economy through the process of hyper-individualistic branding
of the faces of celebrities and the overwhelming role they play in the
construction of the collective cultural imaginary. The theoretical advan-
tage of this approach is the ability to account for the fluid and contradic-
tory workings of power in advanced capitalism by grounding them in
immanent relations and hence resisting them by the same means.

Affirmative politics

I have argued so far that the residual spirituality of psychoanalytic theory

consists in highlighting the affective dimension of subject formation
in three interrelated ways. Firstly, through the sober and non-theistic
acknowledgement of the importance and the autonomy of affects and
desire. Secondly, by stressing the constitutive role played by the ethical
demand of the other in constructing subjectivity. Thirdly, by exploring
the role of the imaginary as visual recognition of the (face of the) other
and the social significance of iconic images. On all three counts the
affective turn introduced by psychoanalysis is a major element in the
postsecular predicament and it paves the way for the further develop-
ments proposed by vital materialism.
260 Rosi Braidotti

The major point of difference between this tradition and Deleuze is

paradigmatic and it corresponds to the switch from Hegel to Spinoza I
mentioned at the beginning. Psychoanalysis incorporates and perpetu-
ates a negative Hegelian vision of desire as Lack and a dialectical under-
standing of the self-other opposition in the constitution of the subject.
Whatever spiritual dimension may be at work in psychoanalysis, it
bears a privileged bond to negativity. Spinoza-based vital materialism
on the other hand takes a firm stand against this tradition of thought
and proposes an alternative based on Spinozist monism and the idea
of desire as plenitude and the expression of freedom. The postsecular
spiritual dimension here entails the notions of the monistic univocity of
being, or radical immanence, positivity, and the productivity of desire.
Affirmative politics challenges the traditional equation between polit-
ical subjectivity and critical oppositional consciousness and the reduc-
tion of both to negativity. What this means is that the political cannot
be assumed to equate the rational, or the public sphere, and that the
spiritual is not the same as the irrational, or the private sphere. We need
more dynamic and porous demarcation lines between these domains; I
will start by discussing political subjectivity.
Deleuze and Guattari diversify political subjectivity along multiple
axes, each of which spells a different location in space and time.
Standard oppositional politics is advocated, in a post-Foucauldian
mode, as a necessary form of resistance to the social manifestations of
injustices, violence, and oppression. This kind of political intervention –
also labelled as ‘la politique’, or politics as usual – is postulated on the
temporal axis of Chronos, linear institutional time. This political stance
acknowledges human vulnerability, on the one hand, and despotic
power relations, on the other.
The political – or ‘le politique’ – on the other hand, is postulated on
the axis of Aion – the non-institutionalized time of becoming and of
affirmative critical practice. It is minoritarian and it aims at the counter-
actualization of alternative states of affairs in relation to the present.
Based on the principle that we do not know what a body can do, the
becoming-political ultimately aims at transformations in the very struc-
tures of subjectivity. It is about engendering and sustaining processes
of ‘becoming-minoritarian’. This specific sensibility combines a strong
historical memory with consciousness and the desire for resistance. It
rejects the sanctimonious, dogmatic tone of dominant ideologies, left or
right of the political spectrum, in favour of a production of affirmative
acts of transformation. The creative aspects of this practice combine with
a profound form of asceticism; that is to say, with an ethics of non-profit
 Conclusion 261

to build upon micro-political instances of activism, avoiding overarching

generalizations or new master discourses (Lyotard, 1984). This humble
yet experimental approach to changing our collective modes of relation
to the environment, social and other, our cultural norms and values, our
social imaginary, our bodies, ourselves, is the most pragmatic manifesta-
tion of the politics of radical immanence.
This distinction between politics and the political is relevant to
discussions of the postsecular predicament. In the work of Michel
Foucault, it is postulated along the double axis of power as restrictive
or coercive (potestas) and as empowering and productive (potentia). The
former focuses on the management of civil society and its institutions,
the latter on the transformative experimentation with new arts of exist-
ence and ethical relations. Politics is made of progressive emancipatory
measures predicated on chronological continuity, whereas the political
is the radical self-styling that requires the circular time of critical praxis.
Critical theory consists in connecting thinking not so much to ‘la poli-
tique’ (organized or majoritarian politics) as to ‘le politique’ (the political
movement in its diffuse, nomadic, and rhizomic forms of becoming).
Thinking is about the creation of new concepts as navigational tools or
‘conceptual personae’ that can assist us in negotiating temporary analyt-
ical frames to capture complexity in its manifold manifestations.
The political is the shared acknowledgement of ethical relationality
and it is postulated upon Spinozist monism (Macherey, 2011) and the
rejection of the legacy of Hegelian-Marxist dialectics of consciousness
and otherness. This school of critical theory banks on negativity and
in a perverse way even requires it, because it builds on the assumption
that the critical position consists in analysing negative social and discur-
sive condition in order to better overthrow them. In other words it is
the same conditions that construct the negative moment – for instance,
the experience of oppression, marginality, injury, or trauma – and also
the possibility of overturning them. The same analytic premises provide
both the damages and the possibility of positive resistance, counterac-
tion, or transcendence (Foucault, 1977a; Brown, 2006). What triggers
and, at the same time, is engendered by this process of both analysis
and resistance is called ‘oppositional consciousness’. In other words, the
negative experience can be turned into the matter that critical theory
engages with and thus into the productive source of counter-truths
and values, which aim at overthrowing not only the real-life negative
instances but also their representations.
This process has become canonized as the equation of critical polit-
ical subjectivity with negativity, oppositional, or, in Hegel’s terms from
262 Rosi Braidotti

Phenomenology of Spirit, the ‘unhappy’ consciousness (Hegel, 1977: §230).

As an alternative, I want to suggest a non-Hegelian, monistic, and vital-
materialist analysis that foregrounds the relational, negotiation-bound,
and affirmative elements of this process. My point is that the political –
as ‘le politique’ – is defined by a relational, affirmative ethics that aims
to cultivate and produce the condition of its own expression: it is a
praxis based on a positive definition of the subject and process-driven,
relational ‘di-vidual’. This assumes that a subject’s ethical core is clearly
not his/her moral intentionality, as much as the effects of power (as
repressive – potestas – and positive – potentia) his/her actions are likely to
have upon the world. It is a process of engendering empowering modes
of becoming (Deleuze, 1990; Braidotti, 2006).
Here is the punchline of contemporary vital-materialist politics: given
that the ethical good is equated with radical relationality aiming at
affirmative empowerment, the ethical ideal is to increase one’s ability
to enter into modes of relation with multiple others. Oppositional
consciousness is replaced by affirmative praxis; political subjectivity is
a process or assemblage that actualizes this ethical propensity. The view
of subjectivity I have been arguing for does not condition the emer-
gence of the subject on negation but on creative affirmation; not on
loss but on vital generative forces. The propensity for affirmation is a
key feature of neo-Spinozist nomadic subjects and it explicitly acknowl-
edges its residual spiritual connotations. Affirmation is the key ethical
value for the postsecular turn in critical theory, which imagines a subject
whose existence, ethics, and politics are not indexed on negativity but
on production of affirmative affects.
The rejection of the dialectical scheme implies also a shift of temporal
gears. It means that the conditions for political and ethical agency are
not dependent on the current state of the terrain: they are not opposi-
tional and thus not tied to the present by negation. Instead, they are
projected across time as affirmative praxis, geared to creating empow-
ering relations aimed at possible futures. Ethical relations create possible
worlds by mobilizing resources that have been left untapped in the
present, including our desires and imagination. They are the driving
forces that concretize in actual, material relations and can, thus, consti-
tute a network, web, or rhizome of interconnection with others.
Such a vision, moreover, does not restrict the ethical instance within
the limits of human otherness, but also opens it up to interrelations with
non-human, post-human, and inhuman forces. The eco-philosophical
dimension is essential to the postsecular turn in that it values one’s
reliance on the multiple ecologies that sustain us in a nature-culture
 Conclusion 263

continuum (Haraway, 1997; Guattari, 1995, 2000) and within which

subjects must cultivate affirmative ethical relations. Critical theory is
rather about strategies of actualization of affirmation as an ethical prac-
tice that consists of multiple micro-political practices of daily activism
or interventions in and on the world we inhabit for ourselves and for
future generations.
The essence of my argument is that there is no logical necessity to link
political subjectivity to oppositional consciousness and reduce critique
to negativity. Critical theory can be just as critical and more persuasively
theoretical if it embraces philosophical monism and vital politics and
disengages the process of consciousness-raising from the logic of nega-
tivity, connecting it instead to creative affirmation. The corollary of this
shift is twofold: firstly, it proves that political subjectivity or agency need
not be aimed solely at the production of radical counter-subjectivities. It
is not a social constructivist oppositional strategy that aims at storming
the Bastille of capitalism, or undoing the winter palace of phallogocen-
trism. It rather involves discontinuous and heterogeneous negotiations
with dominant norms and technologies of the self. Secondly, it argues
that political subjectivity rests on a postsecular ethics of otherness that
values reciprocity as mutual specification or creation. It does not pursue
the recognition of sameness, but rather the quest for creative alterna-
tives and sustainable futures.
This position is postsecular in the sense that it actively works towards
the creation of affirmative alternatives by working through the negative
instances, including their representations. This shift is central to the
postsecular turn in critical theory, which imagines a subject whose exist-
ence, ethics, and politics are not indexed on negativity and hence on
the horizon of alterity and melancholia. This subject is looking for the
ways in which otherness prompts, mobilizes, and allows for the affir-
mation of what is not yet contained in the present conditions, namely
sustainable futures.

Postsecular spirituality

The emphasis on affirmation, desire as plenitude, and consequently

the creation of possible futures is one of the key aspects of the residual
spirituality in critical theory. For instance, the system of feminist civic
values rests on a social notion of faith in progress as the hope for the
construction of alternative social horizons, new norms, and values.
Faith in progress itself is a vote of confidence in the future. Ultimately, it
is a belief in the perfectibility of Wo/Man, albeit it in a much grounded,
264 Rosi Braidotti

accountable mode that privileges partial perspectives (Haraway, 1988).

It is a postsecular position, in that it is an immanent, not transcendental
theory, which posits generous bonds of cosmopolitanism, solidarity, and
community across locations and generations. It expresses sizable doses of
residual spirituality in its yearning for social justice and sustainability.
At some level, postsecular spirituality has all the appearance of a logical
paradox, which conceals deeper levels of complexity. We are confronting
today a postsecular realization that all beliefs – their different propo-
sitional contents notwithstanding – are acts of faith. The operational
concept is faith itself; that is to say, the belief in a social narrative, in
its imaginary hold, and its normative implications. All belief systems
contain a hard core of narrative normativity and of spiritual hope.
Nietzsche put it with customary wit: if you believe in grammar, you
believe in God3 (Kauffman, 1982).
To which I am tempted to reply that God is dead, Marx is dead, and
I am not feeling too well myself,4 so the very scaffolding of contem-
porary belief systems is rather shaky. Postsecular subjects today are at
best believers without belief systems. This is not a crisis, however, but
the opening of multiple possibilities. The vital-materialist vision of the
subject speaks to and of a post-Nietzschean world without monothe-
istic faith. A world without Lack and Law, free from the role of judge-
ment defined as the expression of the negative and despotic face of
power (potestas). It is the universe of Kafka and Beckett, re-read with
Deleuze: a world that has exhausted all faith in traditional values and
eschatological vision of the future, to seek for transformative energy
in the immanence of a continuous present. This world has worked
through the powers of icons and magical thinking, it has sobered up
after the transcendentalist delirium, and has landed here and now in
the humble reality of just a life, just a continuous present that never
forgets the future.
Ontological monism and Spinozist ethics are often criticized as aris-
tocratic, detached from the contingencies of real life and potentially
authoritarian in political terms (Hallward, 2006). I, as most Deleuzians,
on the other hand, praise the ontological pacifism and non-violence of
vital materialism. The awareness of ontological relationality is neither
elitist, nor naïve. It does not exclude the awareness of negative rela-
tions and destructive affects. Elsewhere I have outlined the frame of a
nomadic vital ethics that consists in the praxis of actively constructing
conditions and relations conducive to affirmation (Braidotti, 2006). The
ethical good is a praxis, not a given. It is the collective pursuit of social
relations aiming at constructing affirmative values and practices.
 Conclusion 265

The argument for postsecular spirituality draws strength from the

politics of global consumption of Life itself today and redesigns the rela-
tion to otherness within its opportunistic political economy. We need
to attend to the forces of life and matter that are traversed by and not
exhausted by ‘politics as usual’. This implies giving centre stage to the
vital materialism of zoe as multiple relations or flows of interaction,
production or generative power of the inhuman. This has two major
implications. The first one is ethical: we need to rethink responsibility
in terms of eco-philosophical principles. A diffuse sort of ontological
gratitude is needed in the post-human era, towards the multitude of
non-human agents that is supporting us through the present anthropo-
logical mutation. Bio-centred egalitarianism aims instead at dispersing
and transcending anthropocentrism by dissolving it into a network of
bio-agencies and eco-sophical relations. This is not techno-paganism
but radical immanence in its ethical version, its most concrete form:
it points to the becoming-imperceptible of the former anthropocentric
subject. I will return to this issue.
The second implication is political: we need to organize communities
that reflect and enhance this vision of the subject. This is a commu-
nity that acknowledges difference as the principle of non-Oneness as its
founding myth of origin – anti-Oedipal, post-humanist, vitalist, non-
unitary, and yet accountable. Not bound together by the guilt of shared
violence, or irreparable loss, or unpayable ontological debts – but rather
by the compassionate acknowledgement of our common need to nego-
tiate thresholds on sustainability with and alongside the relentless and
monstrous energy of a ‘Life’ that does not respond to our names. A
political economy of non-compensation needs to be installed – that
is to say, a fundamental principle of non-profit. This rejects the liberal
vision of the subject, which inscribes the political economy of capi-
talism at the heart of subjectivity in terms of losses, perpetual debt,
savings, recognition, and production. Moreover, it moves further than
the histrionic post-psychoanalytic quip about the trappings of the
surplus value of jouissance (Žižek, 2013). Acknowledging instead the
importance of proximity and relation, it turns the margins of unspeak-
able-ness, the traumatized nature of our being-in-the-world and our
shared fragility into the praxis of co-construction of affirmative social
practices. It is an affirmative approach to the tragedy of ‘existence in a
worldly universe that lacks all guarantees’ (Gourgouris, 2013: 23). It is
a form of amor fati, a way of living up to the intensities of life, so as to
be worthy of all that happens to us – to live out our shared capacity to
affect and to be affected.
266 Rosi Braidotti

Postsecular spirituality is the unspectacular, humble acknowledgement

of ontological relationality, which assumes the monistic ontology and
the nature-culture continuum. It consequently involves eco-sophical
interrelations of the non-theistic but vital kind with both human and
non-human others. Postsecular spirituality, redefined as a topology of
affects and affirmative ethics, is one of the attributes of nomadic subjec-
tivity and it designs an ethics of affirmation and an eco-philosophy of
relations. The process of unfolding affects is central to the composition
of radically immanent bodies and thus it can be seen as the actualization
of enfleshed materialism within a monistic ontology. The selection of
the forces of becoming is regulated by an ethics of joy and affirmation,
which functions through the transformation of negative into positive
passions. These are essentially a matter of affinity: being able to enter
a relation with another entity whose elements appeal to one produces
a joyful encounter. They express one’s empowerment as potentia and
increase the subject’s capacity to enter into further relations, grow, and
expand. This expansion is time-bound: the nomadic subject by expressing
and increasing its positive passions empowers itself to last, to endure, to
continue through, and in time defined as Aion, not as Chronos. This is
the politics of becoming: a collective assemblage of forces that coalesce
around commonly shared elements, webs of sustainable interconnec-
tions that empower us to grow and to endure.

Ways of dying
Spiritual practices are embodied and embedded, active and affective.
They do not take place in a fight from the flesh but through it. I want
to take this a step further and argue that nomadic subjectivity as radical
immanence implies a practice of postsecular spirituality which also rede-
signs the idea and the experience of death (Braidotti, 2006). Whereas
psychoanalysis indexes the unconscious libidinal processes in the all-
powerful death drive, whose entropic force is central to human desire
(Laplanche, 1976), nomadic materialism offers a vital vision of death.
Conceptually, death has to do with the ultimate phase of the process
of becoming, according to Deleuze and Guattari, namely becoming-im-
perceptible, in keeping with the deep materialism of my Spinozist roots.
What we humans truly desire as humans is to disappear, to step on the
side of life and let it flow by, without actually stopping it. What we really
aspire to is to self-style our own death (Phillips, 1999). Our fundamental
drive (conatus) is to express the potency of life (potentia), by joining
forces with other flows of becoming. The great animal-machine, the
‘chaosmosis’ (Guattari, 1995) of the universe is the horizon of becoming
 Conclusion 267

that marks the resilience of life as bios/zoe and its generative power also
through what we usually call death.
Death is our becoming-imperceptible. That is the point of fusion
between the self and his/her habitat, the cosmos as a whole. It marks the
point of evanescence of the self and its replacement by a living nexus of
multiple interconnections that empower not the self, but the collective;
not identity, but affirmative subjectivity; not consciousness, but affirma-
tive interconnections. The distinction Deleuze draws from Spinoza and
Blanchot – the distinction between personal and impersonal death – is
relevant here (Deleuze, 1983, 1990, 1995). Personal death of the self as
social identity is the suppression of the individualized ego. Impersonal
death, on the other hand, is beyond the ego: a death that marks the
extreme threshold of my powers to become.
Impersonal death is the incorporeal or intensive event that opens up
a proliferation of generative options of a qualitative different kind. The
becoming-corpse of the body is another phase in the impersonal Life
of the species. What matters is the ethical or intensive Life, which is
ascetically lived as virtual suicide in the pursuit of the destitution of
the unitary self. Ultimately, all one has left is what one is propelled by,
namely affects, relations, and becoming. One is constructed in these
transitions and through these encounters. Impersonal death is the ulti-
mate destitution of selfhood into embodied and embedded relations,
that is to say, into radical immanence.
As I argued elsewhere (Braidotti, 2006), death is the inhuman concep-
tual excess: the unrepresentable, the unthinkable, and the unproductive
black hole that we all fear. Yet, death is also a creative synthesis of flows,
energies, and perpetual becoming. Because humans are mortal, death, or
the transience of life, is written at our core: it is the event that structures
our time-lines and frames our time-zones, not as a limit but as a porous
threshold. In so far as it is ever-present in our psychic and somatic land-
scapes, as the event that has always already happened (Blanchot, 2000),
death as a constitutive event is behind us, it has already taken place as a
virtual potential that constructs our inscription into Time, which is the
other matter Life is made of. The temporality of death is time itself, by
which I mean the totality of time.
The full blast of the awareness of the transitory nature of all that
lives is the defining moment in our existence. It structures our
becoming-subjects, our capacity and powers of relation, and the process
of acquiring ethical awareness. Being mortal, we all are ‘have beens’:
the spectacle of our death is written obliquely into the script of our
temporality, not as a barrier but as a condition of possibility. This death
268 Rosi Braidotti

that pertains to a past that is forever present is not individual but imper-
sonal; it is the precondition of our existence, of the future.
This proximity to death is a close and intimate friendship that calls
for endurance, in the double sense of temporal duration or continuity
and spatial suffering or sustainability. As an individual occurrence, it
will come in the form of the physical extinction of the body; but as
impersonal event, in the sense of the awareness of finitude, of the inter-
rupted flow of my being there, death has already taken place. We are all
synchronized with death – death is the same thing as the time of our
living, in so far as we all live on borrowed time. Making friends with the
impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in
life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor. We build our house on the
crack, so to speak. We live to recover from the shocking awareness that
this game is over even before it started. The proximity to death suspends
life, not into transcendence, but rather into the radical immanence of
‘just a life’ (Deleuze, 1995), here and now, for as long as we can and as
much as we can take. It is indeed the case that the Life in me will go,
but it is zoe, not the rational conscious, sovereign individual, without a
‘self’ that could even claim to supervise, let alone control the process.
Life does go on, as zoe always does; so much so that the injunction is not
the classical ‘give me life (bios) or give me death’, but rather ‘give me life
(zoe) and hence give me death’.
This does not mean, however, that Life unfolds on the horizon of
death. This classical notion is central to the metaphysics of finitude
that, especially in the Heideggerian tradition, sacralizes death as the
defining feature of human consciousness (Agamben, 1998). I want to
stress instead the productive differential nature of zoe, which means
the productive aspect of the life-death continuum. It does not deny the
reality of loss, but rather to re-work it so as to assert the vital powers
of healing and compassion. This is the core of post-human affirmative
ethics in a contemporary Spinozist mode (Braidotti, 2011b). Nomadic
processes of becoming-imperceptible lean towards a spirituality, which is
the opposite of mysticism in the sentimental mode dear to Christianity,
and definitely not a stepping stone to the final redemption. It is not a
morality of fringe benefits, but rather an ethics of non-profit that points
beyond metaphysical life insurance politics. It enjoys gratuitous acts of
kindness in the mode of a becoming-world of the subject.
‘Becoming-imperceptible’ is a way of configuring the transmutation of
values which propels us out of the black hole of critical negativity into
the paradoxically generative void of positivity, or full affirmation. It is a
seduction into life that breaks with the spectral economy of the eternal
 Conclusion 269

return of the Same, and involves friendship with impersonal death. At

that point of becoming-imperceptible, all a subject can do is mark his/
her assent to the loss of identity (defined as a by-product of potestas) and
respectfully merge with the process of potentia itself, and hence with
one’s environment. It is the absolute form of de-territorialization and its
horizon is beyond the immediacy of life.

Conclusion: of possible futures

The core of postsecular spirituality is programmatic and forward-

looking. This volume has been conceived very much in this spirit and as
an affirmative contribution to this ongoing social and symbolic project.
The authors gathered here agree that we need new cosmologies and
world views that are appropriate to our own high level of complexity
and the technological development and to the ferocious and insidious
sets of structural injustices and violent modes of dispossession that mark
the global economy. We need original cultural, spiritual, ethical crea-
tivity, be it myths, narratives, or representations that are adequate to
this new civilization we inhabit (Haraway, 1997).
This project requires more visionary power or prophetic energy, quali-
ties which are neither especially in fashion in critical theory academic
circles, nor highly valued in these times of commercial globalization.
This combination of sensitivity to representational issues and awareness
of the materialist workings of power is the force of critical intellectuals
(West, 1994). More conceptual creativity and theoretical courage are
needed in order to confront the challenges of the global era. Creativity
is unimaginable without some visionary or spiritual fuel.
Prophetic or visionary minds are thinkers of the future. The future as
an active object of desire propels us forth and we can draw from it the
strength and motivation to be active in the here and now of the present.
The present is always the future present: it will have made a positive
difference in the world. Only the yearning for sustainable futures can
construct a liveable present. The anticipation of endurance, of making it
to a possible ‘tomorrow’, transposes energies from the future back into
the present. This is a non-entropic model of energy flow and hence of
transferral of desire as creative becoming. This is not a leap of faith,
but an active transposition, a transformation at the in-depth level, a
praxis that enacts a change of critical culture, also at the ethical level. As
Deleuze put it: we need both a future and a people.
A prophetic or visionary dimension is necessary for critical theory
to secure the one element that advanced capitalism is systematically
270 Rosi Braidotti

depriving us of, namely, sustainable transformations. The propositional

core of the postsecular predicament takes a stand against the cynicism
of neo-Marxists and the nostalgia of neo-Hegelians, with their perpetual
infatuation with violence, antagonism, and confrontation, against the
sterility of the vision of critique as the work of negativity. The residual
spirituality of critical theory resides in acknowledging that we need
to actually dare take the risk of affirmative politics and the collective
construction of social horizons of hope. A qualitative and creative leap
induced by a prophetic, visionary dimension is a way to repair and
compensate for that which we are running out of: time.

Notes
With thanks to Tobjn de Graauw and Ernst van den Hemel for their constructive
comments.
1. In this respect, I concur with Foucault’s claim that Deleuze and Guattari’s
project of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is an introduction to anti-fascism and
to non-fascist ethics (Foucault, 1977b).
2. Faciality is the function of re-territorialization of the subject. It consists in
branding the self as the private property of the capitalist individual, so as to
make it recognizable, consumable, and profitable.
3. Ernst van den Hemel pointed out to me the exact quote: ‘I am afraid we are
not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar’ ( Kaufmann, 1982:
483). Deleuze cites it in The Logic of Sense (1990: 281): ‘Nietzsche’s predictions
about the link between God and grammar has been realized.’
4. This is the text of a graffiti I read on the walls of Paris in the 1980s.

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Index

Abdul-Ahad, Ghaith, 133 Beauvoir, Simone de, 6

accomodationist approach, 25 Beckford, James, 72n6, 180
advanced capitalism, 3 Bender, Courtney, 184
affect, 152–71, 252–9 Benedict XVI, Pope, 26
affective belongings, 155–6, 165–9 Benhabib, Seyla, 3
affirmative ethics, 214, 262 Berger, Benhamin, 185
affirmative politics, 251, 259–63 Berger, Peter, 30n3
Afghan women, 7 Berg-Sørensen, Anders, 9, 35–50
Agamben, G., 115, 256 Bhargava, Rajeev, 15, 30n2
agency, 4, 5, 214 biotechnology, 3
Ahmed, Sarah, 165–6 Blaagaard, Bolette, 213
Ali, Hirsi, 7, 8, 27, 38–9, 86–7, 164–5, Blair, Cherie, 7
212 Blair, Tony, 22
allegory, 119–20 Blanchot, Maurice, 254
anti-Muslim sentiment, 8–9, 11, 27–9, blasphemous feminist art, 10, 228–44
135, 137, 142–3, 164–5, 213 Board, Gerard, 134
anti-racism, 136–9, 141 Boe, Carolina, 86
anti-Semitism, 59, 60, 71 Bolkestein, Frits, 54–5, 63, 210, 211
Appadurai,, 153–4 Bouteldja, Houria, 148, 149
Appiah, K. A., 171n1 Bracke, S., 213
Aquinas, Thomas, 106–7 Braidotti, Rosi, 12, 71–2, 135, 211–12,
Arab Spring, 133 214, 249–70
Arendt, Hannah, 111 Breivik, Anders, 8
Argyle, Margaret, 239–40 Brink, B. van den, 82
art, blasphemous, 228–44 British Columbia, 177–90
Asad, Talal, 2, 40–5, 70, 179, 196, 197 Brouwe, Lenie, 162–3
asceticism, 260–1 Brown, Wendy, 70
assemblages, 257 Bruckner, Pascal, 38, 39
assimilationism, 85, 89–90 Bryden, Mary, 256
atheism, 6, 98, 144, 147 Buruma, Ian, 38–9
Australia, 136, 138 Bush, George W., 7
autonomy, 2, 5, 253 Butler, Judith, 70, 255
Bynum, Caroline Walker, 239
Back, Les, 142 Byrne, Dara, 155, 159–60
backlash politics, 136–7
backwardness, 10, 136 Caldwell, Christopher, 139–40
Badiou, Alain, 10, 115, 117–25, Campbell, Heidi, 154
128–30 Canada, 136, 138, 177–90
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 164 capitalism, 3, 6, 7, 10, 60, 98
Bataille, G., 255–6 carnivalesque, 164–5, 171
Battle of Karbala, 200, 202, 204, 206–7 Casanova, Jose, 175, 181
Baumgartner, Christoph, 10, 77–94 Catholic Church, 26, 84, 177, 187–8,
Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 59 235

273
274 Index

censorship, 133, 230–1 culture

Christa sculptures/paintings, 239–43 digital, 154–72
Christian-Democratic parties, 58, 62 global, 153–4
Christian identity, 25–6 popular, 258–9
Christianity, 1–3, 43, 54, 70, 176 race and, 139–40
colonialism and, 177–9, 183–90 religion and, 215–17
crucifixion and, 234–43 youth, 156, 164, 169, 170–1
early, 59
in Europe, 15–16, 25–6, 154 Dawkins, Richard, 98
Evangelical, 199 death, 266–9
Orthodox, 6 Deleuze, Gilles, 100–1, 257, 259, 260,
Saint Paul and, 115–31 262, 265–7
secularism and, 176–7, 179–82, 213, deliberative democracy, 78–9, 81–3
249 democracy, 1, 2, 9, 11, 14, 37, 39, 43,
Christian theology, 106–7 44, 48, 49, 60, 78–9, 81–3, 86, 87,
Christian values, 25–7 92, 110–12
Church of England, 20, 23, 25 democratic citizenship, 80–1, 83
citizenship, 64 de Mul, Jos, 69
democratic, 80–1, 83 Denmark, 25, 27, 40
ethics of, 77–94 Muhammad cartoon controversy,
religious, 15, 79–81, 91–2 10, 35, 78, 81–93, 134–5, 145–6,
secular, 79–81, 89, 91–3, 186–7 154–5
civilizations Derrida, Jacques, 181, 182, 189,
clash of, 3, 7–8, 49, 60–1, 64–5, 86 253–5, 258
colonialism and, 184 desecularization, 15, 18, 30, 97
class struggles, 129 DHC, 164–5
Cliteur, Paul, 63 difference, 124
Cold War, 6, 60 digital culture, 154–72
colonialism, 4, 17, 71, 148, 176–90, digital spaces, 152–72
196 digital postsecularism, 153–6
communism, 6, 60, 110–12, 117 Dillon, Michele, 80
Confessions on a Dance Floor show, disorientalism, 147
229, 234–43 diversity, 16–17, 144, 200–3, 206,
Connolly, William, 2 222–4
conservative nationalism, 53–74 domination, 253–4
conservativism, 64–8, 71 Douglas, Mary, 232
‘cool Islam’, 156, 168 Dresselhuys, Ciska, 211
Copé, Jean-François, 141 Dutch society
counter-discourses, 155 conservative nationalism in, 53–74
counter-publics, 155, 159–65 values of, 53–4
counter-subjectivity, 5 Du Vernet, Frederick, 187
crisis, 115 Duyvendak, Jan Willem, 64
Critchley, Simon, 254–5, 258
critical secularism, 46–9 Eastern Europe, 154
critical theory, 3, 12, 115–16, 249–70 Eastern European churches, 6
critique, 115 egalitarian universalism, 56
crucifixion, 234–54 Egginton, William, 10, 97–113
Csordas, Thomas, 198 Ego, 123–5, 127
cultural identity, 62 Egypt, 43, 133
cultural racism, 28 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 60
 Index 275

Eisenlohr, Patrick, 11, 195–208 diversity and, 222–4

elites, 98–100, 110 inclusive, 215–21, 224–5
emancipation, 2–5, 7, 20, 71–2, 163, postsecular and, 212–14
170, 190, 211, 215–18, 222–5, religion and, 213–17
229, 233, 239 second-wave, 219–21
emancipatory politics, 3, 4, 7 financial crises, 5, 7
empathy, 103–5 First Nations people, 177–9, 184–90
empirical subjectivity, 100–1 Fitna, 35, 154
“end of history,” 60–1 Forman-Barzilai, Fonna, 112n1
English Defence League (EDL), 141 Fortyun, Pim, 27, 62–3
Enlightenment, 2, 3, 9, 35–6, 37, 100, Foucault, Michel, 42, 117, 261
115, 213, 252 France, 16, 17
critique of religion, 37–9, 46–9 headscarf case in, 22–4, 40–5
ideals, 47 Islamophobia in, 28
radical, 37–9 secularism in, 20–1, 40–5
equality, 2, 39, 40, 60 Francis, Pope, 3
ethics, 100, 214, 255, 258, 260–3 Fraser, Nancy, 155, 159
ethics of citizenship, 77–94 freedom, 10, 98
ethnic identity, 17 free speech, 35–6, 39, 57, 81, 83–4,
ethnicity, 10 133–5, 142, 145, 146
ethnic minorities, 21–2, 136–7, 210 Freud, Sigmund, 254
ethnocentrism, 3–4, 7 Fukuyama, F., 3, 60
Eurocentrism, 2, 253 fundamentalism, 36, 98, 109, 111,
Europe 175–82, 189, 196, 230
see also Western Europe
Christianity in, 15–16, 25–6, 154 Garcia, Cindy Lee, 145
Islamophobia in, 137 Garton, Timothy, 38
Muslims in, 154–5 gay rights, 57, 64, 71, 148–9
postsecularism crisis in, 14–31 Gellner, E., 2
public discourse in, 35–50 gender, 157, 166, 218–19, 232–3
Europeanism, 28–9 equality, 29, 142, 221–2
European Parliament, 5 Muslims and, 26–7, 145
European Union (EU), 61 relations, 5, 11–12
Evangelicals, 60, 199 violence, 5
exceptionalim, 122 generations, 21, 156, 160, 161, 166,
exclusion, 253–4 168, 170, 171
extremism, 28, 35, 143, 157, 164 Germany, 25
global culture, 153–4
fable, 119–20, 122–3, 130n2 global economy, 3
Facebook, 152 global financial crisis, 5
faciality, 259 globalization, 3, 4, 6, 198–200, 202, 207
faith, 1, 72, 106–7, 115, 116, 130n1 God, 106, 109, 112, 257, 264
false consciousness, 129 Goldberg, D. T., 139, 142
Farage, Nigel, 72n1 governmentality, 42, 117, 195
Fekete, Liz, 142 Gramsci, A., 255
female bodies, 232–3 Grotenhuis, M. te, 58
female crucifixion, 234–43 Guattari, F., 253, 257, 259, 260, 266
feminism, 5, 7, 8, 11, 57, 64, 72, guest workers, 210
210–26, 252 Guilbert, Georges-Claude, 235
blasphemous feminist art, 228–44 Gunnell, John G., 66–7
276 Index

Habermas, Jürgen, 1–3, 9, 15, 45, 46, immanent frame, 183

55–6, 77–94, 97, 155, 181–2 immigrants, 16–17, 136
Häger, Andreas, 236 immigration/immigrants, 27, 54,
Hall, Stuart, 139 153–4, 210–11, 214–15
Haraway, D., 256 imperialism, 195
Harris, Sam, 98 India, 200–2, 204–7
headscarves, 22–4, 40–5, 211, 212, Indian Land Question, 177–8, 184–5,
218–19 186–7
Hedehaard, Lars, 145 individualism, 2, 5, 7
Hegel, G.W.F., 59, 260, 261–2 Innocence of Muslims, 35, 132–5, 145,
Heidegger, M., 116, 126, 128 155, 231
hermeneutic theology, 110–12 Institute of Public Policy Research
Hervik, Peter, 86, 145 (IPPR), 20–1
Hesse, Barnor, 136, 137, 138, 140 integration, 54, 146, 212
‘Hirsi Ali Diss’, 164–5 Internet discussion forums, 159–65
Hitchens, Christopher, 98 intersubjectivity, 127–8, 129, 257
Hobbes, Thomas, 100 intertexuality, 147
Hollinger, David, 180 intolerance, 61, 146
homo-nationalism, 8, 64 Islam, 2, 5, 81, 181, 212, 213
homophobia, 5, 148–9 see also Muslims
homosexuality, 29, 64, 148–9, 232–3 affective belongingness and, 165–9
hospitality, 189 anti-Muslim sentiment and, 8–9, 11
Hudson’ Bay Company, 177–8 ‘cool Islam’, 156, 168
Huggan, G., 171n2 democracy and, 86, 87, 92
humanism, 2, 153 exclusion of, from public sphere, 57
human rights, 39 fundamentalist, 182, 230
Hume, David, 100–3 gender and, 157
Huntington, Samuel P., 8, 60–1, 64–5, reformist, 199
86 reimagining of, 147
Husserl, E., 115 as threat, 54
Huxley, A., 137, 138 Islamification, 142
hyperlinks, 169 Islamophobia, 27–9, 137, 142–3, 213
hypertextual selves, 168–9, 170–1 Israel, Jonathan, 37–9
Hyves, 152, 169
Jakobsen, Janet, 97
Ibrajim, Yasmin, 147 Jewish theology, 105–6
iconclash, 236–7 John-Paul II, Pope, 6, 26
iconclasm, feminist, 239–41 Judaism, 60, 70
identity, 17, 19, 67–8 Judeo-Christian roots, 53–74
cultural, 62 Judeo-Christian values, 9, 62–3, 71
formation, 8 Juste, Carsten, 85
national, 64, 68, 71, 72 justice, 101–2
politics, 123, 125–6, 143–4, 228–44
religious, 17, 25, 53, 54, 64, 165–9, Kant, Immanuel, 107–8, 109, 112
230 Karlsson, Lena, 166
secular, 57 Kelly, Joan, 252
shifting, 116–17 Kennedy, James, 71
Universalist, 117–18 Kinneging, Andreas, 67
imaginaries, 175, 184, 258–9 Klassen, Pamela, 11, 175–90
 Index 277

Klausen, Jytte, 86 Marxism, 6, 117, 129

knowledge, 106–7 materialism, 12, 252–9
Korte, Anne-Marie, 11, 228–44 Mauritius, 198–206
Kundnani, Arun, 141 McCullagh, James Benjamin, 185–6,
Kuyper, Abraham, 57 190
Kymlicka, Will, 19 media, 83
coverage of Muhammad cartoon
labour markets, 17 controversy in, 87–8
Lacan, Jacques, 253, 254 religion and, 154
Lambert, Gregg, 10, 115–31 role of, 10
language, 253–4, 255 Meeks, Wayne A., 119, 121
of God, 108 Memoms, 204
philosophy of, 94n3 mentality, 175–7, 184, 189
religious, 79, 81, 89, 94n3 Mepschens, Paul, 64
Latour, Bruno, 237 Mercer, Andrew, 178–9, 190
law, rule of, 2, 39, 80 Merkel, Angela, 138
laws, against religious discrimination, message boards, 159–65
22–3 Midden, Eva, 11, 210–26
Leibniz, Gottfried, 108–9 migrant youth, religion in online
Lentin, Alana, 10–11, 132–49 practices of, 152–72
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender migration theory, 153–4, 210–11
(LGBT) people, 3, 4, 250 Miles, Margaret, 233
Leurs, Koen, 10, 11, 152–72 minarets ban, 28, 146
Levinas, Emmanuelle, 10, 121, minorities, 15, 21–2, 136–7, 210
123–30, 254, 258, 259 missionaries, 177, 181, 183–8
liberal democracy, 110–12 Mitropolous, Angela, 143
liberalism, 25–8, 55, 57, 60, 63–4, modernity, 1–4, 9, 14, 107, 152,
90–1, 98, 99–105, 143–4 181–2, 195–7, 249
liberal-secularism, 10 Modood, Tariq, 9, 14–31
liberty, 39, 40 monism, 253, 255, 257, 260, 263, 264
life, sanctity of, 3 morality, 3, 59, 62, 79, 100–5
Lilla, Mark, 97–8, 99–100, 105, 107–8, moral panic, 3
109 Moroccan-Dutch, 155–72
linguistic turn, 253–4, 257 Mufti, Aamir, 153
Locke, John, 100, 181 Muhammad cartoons, 10, 35, 78,
Lutheran Church, 20 81–93, 134–5, 145–6, 154–5
Lutkenhaus-Lackey, Almuth, 239 multiculturalism, 5, 9–11, 16–19, 29,
31n13, 54, 55, 61, 123, 125–6,
MacKinnon, Rebecca, 133 136, 138–41, 143, 144, 149,
Madonna, 11, 229, 234–43 210–13
Mahmood, Saba, 10, 70–2, 89–90, Mumbai, 198–203, 206–7
183–4 muscular liberalism, 25–7
Maimonides, 105–6 Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), 22–3
Maitland, Sarah, 232 Muslim issue, 10–11, 135, 147, 149
Mamadough, Virginie, 159 Muslims
March, Andrew F., 90–1 see also Islam
Mark, Karl, 6 anti-Muslim sentiment, 8–9, 11,
Martin, Marie, 112n2 27–9, 135, 137, 142–3, 164–5, 213
Marx, Karl, 110, 119, 261 assertiveness by, 21–5
278 Index

Muslims – continued noble lies, 65–6, 67

in Europe, 154–5 nomadic theory, 258
female dress, 17, 22–4, 26–7, 211, Nordic Bishops’ Conference, 84
212, 218–19 norms, 19, 82
gender issues and, 26–7, 157, 166, Nunley, Vorris, 160
218–19 Nussbaum, Martha, 3
Moroccan-Danish youth, online
practices of, 155–72 Obama, Barack, 136, 138
Muhammad cartoons and, 83–93 Odin, Jaishree, 169
religious mobilization among, online communication, 8, 153–6
198–208 ontology, 123, 125–7, 128, 252–9
solidarity with, 84–5, 88–9 oppositional consciousness, 261
stereotypes of, 157, 163–5, 170 Orthodox religion, 6
in Western Europe, 16–19, 21–30 “Other,” 125–6, 127, 128, 213, 253,
women, 17, 23–4, 26–7, 29, 215–19 261

Nakoula, Nakoula Basseley, 132, 133, Pakistan, 201

154 Parekh, Bhikhu, 19
Nash, David, 231 particularism, 125, 127
national identity, 64, 68, 71, 72 Party for Freedom, 35
nationalism, 6, 26, 28–9, 136, 153 Paul, see Saint Paul
conservative, 53–74 Pellegrini, Ann, 97
homo-nationalism, 8, 64 performative construction, 10
nation-state, 43, 184, 188, 195, 197 Peters, Bernhard, 82
natural law, 3 Peters, John Durham, 134–5
Nazism, 87, 122, 128, 137 phenomenology, 117
neoconservative politics, 5, 10, 53–74, Philips, Anne, 143
256 philosophy, 59, 116, 182
neo-imperialism, 4 piety, 5, 170, 171, 200–3
neoliberalism, 6–7, 10 pillarization, 20, 21, 57
neo-materialism, 12 Piss Christ, 231
neorealism, 211 Pitcher, Ben, 139
neo-secularism, 16 Plate, Brent, 232
Netherlands, 20, 21, 27, 154, 212 Plato, 66
immigration to, 210–11, 214–15 pluralism, 200–3
Judeo-Christian roots in, 53–74 Poland, 6
minorities in, 210 political agency, 5
Moroccan-Danish youth in, 155–72 political debates, 81–93
multiculturalism in, 54, 55 political economy, 98, 253–4
politics in, 57–8 political institutions, 40, 48
progressive critics in, 68–70 political secularism, 14–31, 40
public discourse in, 214–15 political subjectivity, 5
new atheism, 144 political theology, 41–6, 98, 100, 112,
New Labour, 22 256
New Right, 58 politics
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 59, 257, 264 affirmative, 251, 259–63
Niezen, Ronald, 184 backlash, 136–7
9/11, 61 democratic, 78
Nisga’a Nation, 177–90 emancipatory, 3, 4, 7
 Index 279

politics – continued race, 10, 136, 137, 139–40, 149, 152,

identity, 123, 125–6, 143–4, 154, 155
228–44 racism, 4, 8, 11, 28, 135, 137–43, 149,
neoconservative, 5, 10, 53–74 157, 253
religion and, 41–2, 44–9, 55, 70–2 radical Enlightenment, 37–9
theology and, 105–9 Ramadan, Tariq, 212
unframed, 105–9 rationality, 2
Ponzanesi, Sandra, 10, 11, 152–72 Ratzinger, Cardinal, 2, 3
popular culture, 258–9 Reagan, Ronald, 60
postcolonial contexts, 11, 152–3 real estate, 176–90
postcolonialism, 154, 155, 171n1 reason, 1–2, 6, 116–17
postmodernism, 171n1 relationality, 256
post-racial, 135–6, 137–41 religion, 15, 176, 195
postracialism, 144 see also Christianity; Islam
postsecularism, 1–5, 9–12, 53, 55–6, activism, 195, 197, 200–1
171n2, 175–6, 195–6, 250 backwardness and, 1, 10
Christianity and, 180 blasphemous feminist art and,
crisis of, 14–31 228–44
critical theory and, 249–70 critique of Enlightenment, 37–9
critics of, 69–70 culturalization of, 72
defined, 56 culture and, 215–17
digital, 153–6 Enlightenment critique, 46–9
feminism and, 212–14 feminism and, 213–17
historical background, 6–9 fundamentalism, 7–8
postcolonialism and, 152–3, 155 globalization and, 198–200, 202, 207
spirituality and, 263–9 liberalism and, 99–105
postsecular societies, 3, 9, 15, 46 marginalization of, 15
ethics of citizenship in, 77–94 media and, 154
power, 37, 39, 46, 48, 261 mobilization of, 196–208
Prins, Baukje, 211 in online practices, 152–72
profit motive, 7 Orthodox, 6
progress, 1, 2, 7, 11 politics and, 41–2, 44–9, 55, 70–2
progressives, 68–72 postsecularism and, 195–6
property rights, 181 privatization of, 196
see also real estate Protestant notion of, 89, 90
Protestantism, 55, 181 public, 15, 20–1, 29
protests, against Muhammad in public sphere, 5–6, 36, 57
cartoons, 84–8 race and, 136, 137, 152, 154, 155
psychoanalysis, 117, 253–5, 258–60 regulation of, 36–7, 44, 200–3
public culture, 82–3, 93 sexuality and, 229–30
public discourse, 35–50, 87, 91, 93, standardized, 203–7
179–80, 211, 214–15 violence and, 83
public sphere, 56, 155 religious beliefs, 97, 98, 108–9, 112
political, 79 religious citizens, 15, 79–81, 91–2
religion in, 5–6, 36, 57 religious communities, 80, 91
Pussy Riot, 230 religious discrimination, laws against,
22–3
Al Qaeda, 181 religious identity, 17, 25, 53, 54, 64,
Qur’an, 39, 64, 215 165–9, 230
280 Index

religious language, 79, 81, 89, 94n3 ideology of, 5

religious minorities, 15, 136–7, 210 Indian, 205–6
religious pluralism, 11 liberal-secularism, 10
reverse racism, 136, 141 moderate, 20–1
Ridley, William, 187 modernity and, 9
Rieman, Rob, 68 political, 14–31, 40
“right to offend,” 133–5 self-critical, 48
right-wing parties, 28, 35, 65, 143, 157 varieties of, 44
riots, Paris, 17 secularization, 50n1, 54–5, 97, 135,
Robbins, Bruce, 153 175, 181, 195–7, 207, 233–4
Robbins, Joel, 198 secularization myth, 1, 9, 97–9, 153
Roman Empire, 120, 130 secular values, 61
Rose, Flemming, 86 self-censorship, 83
Rose, Nicholas, 3, 81 self-critical secularism, 48
Rouhs, Manfred, 134 self-determination, 39
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 107–8 sensibilities, 175
Roy, O., 15 separation of church and state, 2, 57,
Rupert’s Land, 177–8 80
Rushdie, Salman, 22–3, 230 Serrano, Andres, 231
sexual freedom, 5, 142
Sadek, Morris, 133 sexuality, 149, 219, 229–30, 233–4
Said, Edward, 153 sexual orientation, 27, 29, 64, 148–9,
Saint Paul, 115–31 232–3
Sandys, Edwina, 239, 240 sex-ularism, 252
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 24, 72n4 Sloterdijk, P., 3
The Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 22–34 Smith, Adam, 103–4
Scherer, M., 15 Smith, Dan, 257
Schmitt, Carl, 41–2, 43, 44, 45, 213, Smith, Rogers M., 46–7
256 social imaginaries, 175–6, 258–9
science, 2, 3, 79, 117 social movements, 3
scientific knowledge, 107 social networking sites, 152, 169
Scott, Joan, 71–2, 233, 234, 252 social progress, 2
secular citizens, 15, 79–81, 89, 91–3, social relations, 126, 129
186–7 sovereignty, 41–4, 62, 98, 181, 182,
secularism, 1–4, 40, 175–6 190, 197
alternative, 47 Spaemann, Robert, 72n3
anti-Muslim sentiment and, 8–9 Sparrow, Jeffrey, 144, 147
Christianity and, 1–3, 176–7, Spinoza, Baruch, 38, 257, 260, 264
179–82, 213, 249 spiritual domination, 184
colonialism and, 179–90 spirituality, 16, 152, 251, 255–6, 263–9
concept of, 49, 50n1 Spruyt, Bart Jan, 64, 67–8
critical, 46–9 state churches, 181
critics of, 39–45, 55 stereotypes, 157, 163–5, 170
discourses, 40 Stevens, Christopher, 133
doctrine of, 36–7 Stop the Islamization of Europe
feminism and, 210–26 (SIOE), 137
fixed notions of, 142–7 Strauss, Leo, 65–7, 256
forms of, 4 structuralism, 117
France, 20–1, 40–5 subaltern counterpublics, 155
 Index 281

subculture, 166 van der Veer, Peter, 71

subjectivity, 5, 88–90, 100–1, 115, van Gogh, Theo, 35, 154, 212
214, 225, 252, 255, 257, 261–3 Vattimo, Gianni, 110, 111–12
Submission, 35, 154 violence, 81, 83
Switzerland, 28, 146 vital materialism, 252–9
Voltaire, 58–9
Taguieff, Pierre-André, 138
Tax, Meredith, 133, 144 Wade, Peter, 137
Taylor, Charles, 2, 19, 98, 135, 183, war on terror, 6, 8, 61, 135
184, 189–90, 190n2, 196–7 Western Europe
Tebble, Adam, 143 see also Europe
technology, 3, 6, 8, 153–6 Islamophobia in, 27–9
terrorism, 6, 28, 61, 142, 201 Judeo-Christian roots in, 53–74
theology, 59, 98, 100, 105–9, 126 multiculturalism in, 18–19, 29
democracy and, 110–12 Muslims in, 16–19, 21–30
hermeneutic, 110–12 postsecularism crisis in, 14–31
philosophy and, 116 secularism in, 20–1
political, 41–6, 98, 100, 112, 256 Western values, 6, 210
Titley, Gavan, 10–11, 132–49 whiteness, 213
tolerance/toleration, 25, 39, 54, 64, white supremacy, 7
68–9, 107, 144, 206 Wilders, Geert, 8, 10, 27, 35, 61–2, 64,
totalitarianism, 36, 142 70, 71, 73n7, 142, 146, 154–5,
tradition, 64–8 157, 163–4
transcendence, eradication of, 97–113 women, 3, 7, 250
Tuin, Iris van der, 220 Afghan, 7
bodies of, 7, 232–3
underdevelopment, 7 emancipation of, 4, 5, 71–2, 163,
United Kingdom, 20–1, 31n6 170, 211, 215–18, 222–6, 229,
Islamophobia in, 28 233, 239
Rushdie affair in, 22–3 feminism and, 210–26
United States, 16, 60, 65–6, 118, 120, headscarves worn by, 23–4, 211,
138 212, 218–19
universalism, 3, 19, 56, 119, 121–2, Muslim, 17, 23–4, 26–7, 29, 215–19
125–6, 129–30 self-determination, 8
univocity, 256–7, 260 World Conference on Artistic Freedom
utility, 102–3 of Expression, 230–1
World Islamic Network, 202
Valenta, Markha, 71 world views, 175
values, 82
Christian, 26–7 xenophobia, 8, 135
Dutch, 53–4
Judeo-Christian, 62–3, 68–9, 71 Yilmaz, Ferruh, 146, 149
liberal, 57 Young, Iris, 19
Muslim, 26–7 youth culture, 156, 164, 169, 170–1
progressive, 71–2 YouTube, 35, 132, 133, 158, 167
secular, 61
Western, 6, 210 Zabala, Santiago, 110, 111–12
Valverde, Marianna, 188, 190n4 Žižek, S. J., 116, 265
van den Hemel, Ernst, 9–10, 53–74 Zuckerman, Ethan, 133