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https://doi.org/10.5117/NTT2021.3/4.008.TAYL

Comments on the Contributors

Charles Taylor
McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Abstract
In this essay, I comment on the contributions of the six authors who have
critically reflected on my notion of a ‘Catholic Modernity’ from their own
perspectives. Selecting particular issues from these authors to comment
on was challenging due to the richness of each contribution. I comment,
among others, on the crucial question of religious violence and intolerance
in our world and the related issue of how to deal with pluralism among
and within religions: we can no longer identify a particular religion with
“its” civilization or nation, be it in the form of Christendom, Islamicate, or
religious nationalism.

Keywords: Catholic modernity, David Martin, Bernice Martin, Francis

Schüssler Fiorenza, Robert Cummings Neville, Souleymane Bachir
Diagne, Jonathan Boyarin

David Martin’s extraordinarily interesting paper1 takes up the question

of Anglican modernity, but ranges way beyond that to a number of other
important issues.
To take up the account of contemporary Anglicanism, a crucial difference
with Roman Catholicism comes to light. Anglicans, like Catholics, are
deeply divided about issues of sexual ethics between those who cleave
to traditional teachings, and those who see some of them as unjust and
uncharitable—in their views about homosexuality, for instance. But the
conflict in the Catholic case is made much more intractable because the

1 David Martin, “Pointing to Transcendence: Reflections from an Anglican Context,” NTT

Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion 75, no. 3/4 (October 2021): 310-336.

 Charles Taylor
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deep issues of the very shape of authority are engaged. The issue can’t be
settled by coming to a punctual agreement on a particular ruling; the whole
question of the authority of the magisterium is at stake.
As David points out, the Catholic position has been made more rigid by
the ill-starred and politically motivated action of Pius IX, launching the
confused and confusing doctrine of papal infallibility. This narrows the gap
between disagreement and apostasy and lends an all-or-nothing character
to every issue. This difference also explains why my original Marianist
lecture carried a normative argument, about the legitimacy of a certain
way of being Catholic today, whereas David’s account of contemporary
Anglicanism is more in the nature of a report.
But, as I said above, he goes way beyond this with a set of interesting
reflections on the differences between major religious traditions. For
instance, his point is well taken about the difference between Christian
and Islamic societies on the issue of blasphemy laws. But I think this needs
to be taken in the context of another crucial factor, which is the place of
religious identities as markers of political mobilization.
David mentions how the historic national religious identity can be rein-
forced in the face of alien rule, as is evident in Eastern European countries
recently liberated from Communism, in particular Poland. As Ivan Krastev
has also argued, the fact that these identities were rather brutally repressed
under alien rule, has given them fresh strength once this rule is lifted,2 to
the point where now some Eastern European countries are less amenable to
accepting the reigning EU ethic of diversity and open borders. This resist-
ance can take caricatural forms, as when Victor Orban defends Christian
civilization against Syrian refugees, but can be very serious, in the case of
Poland, for instance.
Moreover, a religious identity as a marker of mobilization for national
unity and solidarity tends to reinforce the more traditional variants. In a
sense, it changes the center of gravity of the faith as lived by the people
concerned. So that the very Catholic movement of Solidarnosc, whose
chaplain was Fr Jòzef Tischner, whose founding leader was Lech Wałensa,
whose major intellectual was Adam Michnik, and which was inspired and
backed by John Paul II, nevertheless finds its successor party losing power to
the upstart ultra-orthodox Prawo I Sprawiedliwosc of Jarosław Kaczyński,
spreading prolific calumnies about neighboring countries and (non-existent)
Muslims. And in Russia, the liberated Orthodox Church is in cahoots with
the government to make it difficult for new religions to gain adherents.

2 Ivan Krastev, After Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

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Something similar has happened to Islam in many parts of the modern

world. Pakistan is a case in point. In the mind of Jinnah and a good
part of the early leadership, the dream of Pakistan conceived it as a
continuation of the Islamicate of the sub-continent. The idea of this
formerly hegemonic culture being subordinated to a mass Hindu majority
was unbearable. This meant in Jinnah’s view that the formerly Muslim
majority provinces should form the new state, but this would naturally
contain Hindu minorities, even as rump India would include Muslims.
But partition and the panic massacres which it triggered meant that the
Muslim state ended up almost totally homogeneous. As Jinnah remarked,
the Pakistan he received was “moth-eaten.” But the dynamic of a state
carved out in conflict with India, and with continuing fears of the larger
nation meant that the sense of what it was to be an Islamic state changed,
from one defined by an Islamicate culture to one based on pious Islam,
with fateful consequences. The irony is that someone of the same confes-
sional identity as Jinnah, who was ultra-Shi’ite, would be in danger in
contemporary Pakistan, but a happy cognitive dissonance allows his
photograph to go on hanging in official buildings. Meanwhile Pakistan’s
military intelligence runs a number of extreme jihadi organizations. The
aim is to destabilize India in Kashmir, but the ultimate casualty is the
stability of Pakistan itself.
In many parts of the world, the center of gravity of lived Islam has shifted,
so that an Islam of personal piety, in particular among followers of differ-
ent Sufi communities, is losing ground to a hard line Islam of narrowly-
interpreted and severely enforced Sharia, often fueling (the lesser) jihad. I
will return to this when talking about Bashir’s paper.
For the moment I would like to say a few words about the very inter-
esting coda of David’s paper, dealing with Romanticism. Much has been
written about creations of the Romantic period which served as the basis
for substitute and relatively non-doctrinal religions. A lot of this is very
insightful. But it only gives us part of the story. Romantic art—poetry, music,
painting—often produced a powerful sense of connection with a cosmic
order, or a sense of the numinous, or a heightened sense of our existence in
an integrated time, which could be lived on its own, without being taken
beyond to some more demanding faith commitment. But the creation of this
“middle zone” between enlightened disenchantment and faith commitment
could serve two ends. It could offer a zone for the experience of something
deeper, which didn’t demand that one go farther. Or it could offer a new
way of returning to faith, via a different and unprecedented itinerary, as
we see with Chateaubriand, for instance, or Hopkins.

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Bernice Martin’s paper on Pentecostals3 today refreshingly deconstructs

most of the binaries accepted as authoritative in the Western immanent
frame: modern/pre-modern, individual/embedded, buffered/porous, male-
dominated/open to women, and so on. This is not to say that these binaries
cannot make sense in the societies that operate in the mental sphere of the
modern immanent frame; or at least did until recently make sense. What
this bonfire of binaries is testimony to is the great and always unpredictable
power of human inventivity.
Pentecostalism is a new phenomenon, or a chain of new phenomena in
the Christian world, and thus in the human world at large. It breaks with the
age-old Christian model of a church, a long lasting (in principle, lasting until
the Parousia) community of the faithful under some continuing authority,
and with recurring rituals of definite form. Pentecostals on the other hand
privilege the powerful, even overwhelming immediate experience of the
Spirit, on the model of the New Testament accounts of Pentecost. Being
moved, transformed by such visitations is what counts rather than the
legitimacy of the form, or the authority under which they occur. And the
result is a tendency to split, break apart, to found new churches of the
like-minded, or similarly moved.
As Bernice repeatedly says, this is what makes it almost impossible to
make any secure generalizations about the movement, and why various
branches of it can situate themselves so effortlessly on both sides of (what
seems to us—or at least me) a solid, informative binary. Take one I still very
much like: “buffered” versus “porous” selves. I still like it, because it seems to
get at an important difference between contemporary denizens of Western
civilization, on the one hand, and their ancestors in Mediaeval Europe on
the other. But the error would be to think that we all inevitably move from
the second to the first; or differently put, that parallel moves in different
civilizations will take the same form. Members of Pentecostal churches
in Africa feel themselves to be in a world of spirits, benign and malign,
very much as Christians did in the first centuries in the Mediterranean
world. Like them, they sense not only the Spirit of God, but evil spirits who
resist the work of this Spirit. But the ability to take a new stance in this
spiritual world which comes from conversion represents a break with this
perhaps millennial background. So that some anthropologists want to say

3 Bernice Martin, “A Pentecostal Modernity? A Response to Charles Taylor’s ‘A Catholic

Modernity?’,” NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion 75, no. 3/4 (October 2021): 337-370.

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that witchcraft and the countervailing exorcism as practiced in Nigeria is

a feature of modernity.4 In a similar way, and closely related to the above
binary, that often coded as individual/dividual has to be reconfigured to
make sense of what happens in the “majority world” (what is often called
the “South”).5

What is remarkable here is the “discovery,” or recovery, of a historically

new way of tapping into the power of forgiveness, acceptance, redemption
implicit in the Gospel story. One can trace its antecedents, as Bernice does,
through pietism, Methodism, certain facets of “Awakenings” and revivals
in US history, up to the crucial happening in Azusa Street, Los Angeles in
1906 that inaugurated the worldwide movement. But how to understand
the emergence of this new and powerful way of invoking the power of
the Spirit, which can be effective far outside the historical home turf of
institutional Christianity, which was the indispensable background of
the earlier stages—Pietism, Awakenings, revivals—in this movement?
Nothing in social science prepared us for this; but perhaps not in established
theologies either.

But undoubtedly, this movement creates dilemmas for Christians, like

myself, for whom the emergence of the human rights agenda represents a
long-term fruit of the Gospel. More accurately, in its international definition
(for instance, in the Universal Declaration), it represents the combined
influence of more than one Axial tradition, but emphatically including
the strand which emerges in Christianity. They contribute to the already
existing gulf separating Christians in the Northwest from those in the
South and East, on such issues as homosexuality and (certain aspects of)
gender equality. So one f inds some evangelicals in the support base of
Bolsonaro in Brazil; as some of them supported Trump in America. All of
this indicates how far we have to go before we can come to a common mind
among Christians on these matters.
We might be tempted to use the “l” word here and talk of “liberal” versus
“illiberal” Christianity. But that misses an extremely important point. I
would maintain that the Christian imperative towards equality and non-
discrimination in these areas doesn’t simply repose on widely accepted
liberal principles, but stems particularly and powerfully from the imperative
to look at social arrangements from the standpoint of those who suffer from

4 Bernice Martin, “A Pentecostal Modernity?,” 362-363.

5 Bernice Martin, “A Pentecostal Modernity?,” 351 ff.

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them, and to ask searching questions about such arrangements: are they
really necessary for the common good? When one really manages to grasp
what they mean for the people concerned, does one still feel confident in
the reasons one had for supporting them? This is, of course, not a principle
from which policies can be deduced; it is a mode of questioning which aims
at the right answers; and it is one that I believe derives from the stance of
Jesus in the Gospels—although, of course, it may not always be possible to
follow through fully on the answers, for reasons David has outlined, and I
referred to above.
If this is true, then we have a job of convincing fellow Christians, and
by other arguments our fellow citizens in general, of the validity of this
approach. And this will never be done simply by shaming them or branding
them as primitives or “deplorables.” We will need lots of encounters of
the kind Bernice describes at the end of her paper, carried out by Adam
Seligman. The reasons people resist this stance of openness and readiness
to understand the stranger also need to be sympathetically understood
if the resistance is to dissolve. And even with our best effort, we will not
convince everyone.

Francis Schüssler Fiorenza6 has presented a number of very interesting new

paths to be explored, and at the same time some challenges to the concepts I
tried to introduce. I am more than ever aware how problematic these concepts
are. Of course, the most problematic of all is “transcendence,” and I have already
said that I feel very dissatisfied with this,7 and see the need for either another
definition, or for a wholly different way of distinguishing, say “exclusive”
humanism from certain faith positions. Here I want still to go on ducking this
challenge; although when I am finished with my responses to papers, who
knows? I may come up with some formula to save the concept of transcendence.
But for the moment, I would just like to clarify a bit some other terms
that I used, and hope to convince readers that they are still useful.

6 Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Transcendence, Catholicism and the Challenges of Modernity.”

NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion 75, no. 3/4 (October 2021): 371-396.
7 Charles Taylor, “Concluding Reflections and Comments,” in A Catholic Modernity? Charles
Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, ed. James L. Heft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999),
106.

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Let me start with the “buffered self.” This notion was defined over against
the primary meaning for me of the “enchanted” world, the world of spirits
and magic forces, in which our ancestors lived, and in which many people
still live in our contemporary world, but to which we, in Western culture
at least, have largely been rendered insensitive. I was drawn to the word
“buffered” because I see life in a world of magic forces (to sum these up
perhaps a bit too hastily) as characterized by a deep sense of vulnerability
or susceptibility to these forces; consequently marked by a sense of awe,
tinged with fear; a condition that required various objects and actions
which could counter the threat these forces offered. The average inhabitant
of our modern Western society doesn’t have this full sense of vulnerability,
although certain relics of it can be felt at moments where a feeling of the
uncanny (the “unheimlich”) arises. But for the most part, we watch movies
or read stories of spirits, ghosts and the uncanny with, at most, a certain
pleasant frisson.
But this is not the same question as that of which option we find ourselves
taking in what I have called the “immanent frame”; whether we see it as
all there is, or as pointing to something more, something “beyond” (to use
that problematic adverb, whose indeterminacy Fiorenza rightly points to).
Thus in my parlance, one can be a buffered self and a devotee of a theistic
faith, and one lives alongside other buffered selves who have a thoroughly
“naturalistic” outlook.
Nor does a buffered self necessarily take a stance of egoistic individualism.
One can feel very strongly a collective identity—that of one’s nation, or of
one’s community, or of a political, or social, or religious movement that
one is passionately attached to. Not does one need to define oneself as a
“punctual” self, in the sense I tried to define in my discussion of Locke in
Sources of the Self.
Nevertheless, I think that the move from “porous” to “buffered” selves is
a very important shift which helps define the predicament in which people
end up feeling drawn either to faith or unbelief. It matters whether this issue
presents itself against the background of an enchanted world, some forces in
which are malign, and can be countered by the action of a benign God; or on
the other hand against the background of a disenchanted immanent frame.
Another important shift of the last 500 years, first in the West and then
elsewhere, is the development of a sense that we humans can alter our
condition in fundamental ways. Of course, as Fiorenza rightly points out,
we shouldn’t look down on the technologies of earlier periods. The way the
Romans transported water through aqueducts should still inspire wonder
and admiration. But somewhere in the course of the 17th-18th centuries came

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a new understanding, at first among elites, but later spreading more broadly,
that a great many of the dangers and threats to which we are vulnerable
can be averted by the requisite organization (enforcing quarantine, for
instance, to check the spread of plague), or application of new methods, or
discoveries, or mass planting of new crops (the turnip, for instance). The
invention/discovery of new sources of energy (at first coal in steam engines)
transformed production in the shift we speak of as the Industrial Revolution.
And what emerges from all this is an immense can-do spirit, and thus the
search for new ways to transform our condition.
Of course, we now see that many of these innovations can have dangerous,
even disastrous side-effects; but even then, our first reaction is to try to find
a new technological fix to overcome these unwelcome developments. But my
point here is not to judge this shift in our sense of power over our condition, or
to point out its blind spots which may still end up destroying our civilization.
Once again, it is to allow us to measure how this change alters the whole
condition in which we find ourselves faced with options like that between
faith and unbelief, or a disenchanting drive to control versus a sense of awe
and wonder in face of a world which has deeper meanings we don’t grasp.
In the present context, it is difficult for those who have internalized this
new sense of power to see a plague or famine as a trial sent from God, either
to punish us or to test our faith. Or they can’t be seen as emanating from a
force to be placated, which might then remove the threat.
What I was looking for in A Secular Age was a way of defining what I
called the changing “conditions of belief,” when one moves for example
from the situation of Europeans in 1500 to the predicament of Westerners,
and indeed, millions of others today.
In the same vein, it obviously makes a great difference whether one
sees the structure of society as determined by its placement in a cosmic,
many-leveled order of being, as for instance, the French monarchy of the
Ancien Régime was understood in its hey-day. Now we cannot think of any
political society whose existence couldn’t be somehow traced either to the
drift of events, or in more contemporary cases, to a founding moment, after
a revolution or liberation, in which named people took action, put in motion
various movements, brought about the acceptance of a constitution, and
thus brought into existence a new political entity.
I am here pointing out changes which the old, post-Second World War
secularization theory took as the obvious causes of the equally obvious (as
they thought) decline of religion. I don’t believe in this simple diagnosis of
decline, but I believe that the conditions of belief have profoundly changed,
and that we need to try to get clearer on the nature of this change.

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But in order to carry this out, we need to devise or evolve a language in

which the various options between which people stand, and are differentially
drawn to, can be described. Which means that we have to make sense of
some terms of the following range: “transcendent,” “beyond,” “exclusive
humanism,” “naturalism,” and the like. I agree with Fiorenza that I still
have a long way to go in this latter enterprise.

I am very grateful to Robert Cummings Neville for his very interesting and
(to me) extremely instructive paper.8 At the end of the paper, he asks the
question: “With how much of this can Taylor agree?” and then answers his
own question: “I suspect very much.”9 I heartily concur in this conclusion.
Indeed, I concur in a great deal, and have very few disagreements. But this
leaves a large middle area, where I encountered interesting and intriguing
ideas that I couldn’t yet work out exactly where I stand on them; as well, as
passages where my grasp was rather rudimentary.
But to start with the agreements, I am utterly committed, as is Robert,
to the need for more penetrating comparative work. He notes in passing
that my Secular Age was exclusively concerned with the North-West. But
the reason for this was precisely my sense of the importance of comparative
work. I wanted to discredit the idea, widely adopted among sociologists,
and even some historians, that secularization was a uniform process, tak-
ing place in the same manner across all societies and civilizations, only
spread out in time. One civilization initiated it (guess which); and then it
was followed by others, either imitating, or responding to the same basic
necessities of “modernization” (and often imitating less completely and
competently). Whereas I was already committed to the idea of “multiple” or
“alternative” modernities, pioneered by Shmuel Eisenstadt and developed
further by a little-known interdisciplinary network that I belong to (the
Centre for Transcultural Studies), it seemed obvious to me that what we
call “secularization” was a very different process in different parts of the
world, and that the way to make headway was to try a more fine-grained
account of a civilization I had some acquaintance with, and then use this
as a foil to make comparisons. When a prominent Indian historian read my

8 Robert C. Neville, “Confucian Modernity, Ultimacies, and Transcendence,” NTT Journal for
Theology and the Study of Religion 75, no. 3/4 (October 2021): 397-428.
9 Neville, “Confucian Modernity,” 426.

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book and reacted: “That was interesting, but it didn’t happen here,” I was
delighted. That was exactly the reaction I was hoping for. I hope that the
book has contributed to the interesting comparative efforts which have
been carried out recently. Rather than faulting it for its parochial focus, one
might argue that a major failing of the book was that it didn’t account for
many of the particular trajectories within the West, like the Lutheran one
for instance; in a way that David Martin did in his General Theory book.10
I now want to turn to one of the interesting and potentially fruitful ideas
in the paper, the notion of an “ontological creative act.”11 This underlies
everything that exists, and can be described, but itself is beyond possible
knowledge. However, we unavoidably try to capture it in master images; and
Robert identifies three “strategies for referring to the ontological creative
act which have been developed respectively in West Asia, South Asia and
East Asia.”12 The first, which includes the Biblical story posits a god based
on our notion of a person. The South Asians (in the sub-continent) begin
with the Vedas, which emphasize the purity of consciousness, epitomized in
pure atman; but then the Buddhists “deny any kind of underlying reality.”13
Here I have a quibble, based probably on my own confusions: why doesn’t
this mean that Buddhism has no creation-analogue at all? And another
quibble arises concerning Hinduism: how to cope with the bhakti dimension
of Hindu piety? Can it be understood in terms of “pure consciousness”? I
emphasize that these quibbles probably represent nothing more than my
own confusion and lack of familiarity with the traditions concerned.
Robert then explains that East Asians abandoned “the metaphoric use
of persons for referring to the ontological creative act” and “used non-
personalistic metaphors of spontaneous emergence.”14 This makes possible an
interesting contrast between Chinese religious traditions, and Biblical ones
(I mean ones which return to a root revelation to Abraham, which therefore
include Islam and the Qu’ran). This is the kind of formulation which helps
us parochial descendants of Abraham to conceive a new possibility outside
our own tradition. Robert’s work seems to me extremely fertile in opening
up new possibilities of this kind for Western philosophers and theologians.
He calls this kind of work “metaphysical,” and I have never for a min-
ute shared the positivist disdain for metaphysics. In addition, I consider

10 David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).

11 Neville, “Confucian Modernity,” 410.
12 Neville, “Confucian Modernity,” 415 ff.
13 Neville, “Confucian Modernity,” 416.
14 Neville, “Confucian Modernity,” 417.

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philosophers who speak of “post-metaphysical” thought as being radically

confused. So that is not my problem. But I do think that, just because our
conceptual grasp of both is so tenuous and so steeped in metaphor, that our
understanding of and attachment to any given picture is mostly due to our
religious practice, prayer, meditation, ritual, and so on. Christian images of
God are deeply shaped by responses to divine love and kenosis. Of course,
this latter judgment reflects my background in Quebec, whose Catholic
Church was founded by the Catholic Reformation in 17th century France,
where the experience and teachings about the love of God (genitives both
subjective and objective) of St François de Sales, and Marie de l’Incarnation
loomed so large. But I cite these, as well as related devotions to the Sacred
Heart, just as examples of how our “metaphysic” in this area is given shape
and force by our modes and paths of piety.
Maybe this dependence of metaphysic on forms of piety is not universally
true, maybe it only applies to Abrahamic traditions (and of course, Bhakti
traditions), but I don’t think so. But what emerges from these reflections is
a suggestion that we compare not just metaphysics, but whole packages of
metaphysic-and-practice. Indeed, it is quite possible that this is what Robert
had in mind, and I am just slowly fumbling my way forward to catch up.
I would like to add that I found myself very much in agreement with the
last section of Robert’s paper, in which he describes in 11 points the stances
and goals of a “Confucian modernist.”15 So much so, I ended up wondering
whether I was a Confucian modernist myself (shades of M. Jourdain in
Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme discovering that he had always been
speaking prose). But then I remembered St François de Sales (not to speak
of his namesake in Assisi), and realized that I had not yet made the grade.

I found Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s paper16 very interesting, and I read

it with great sympathy. I believe, as he does, that we are substantially in
agreement on certain basic issues.
In order to explain my reaction, I would like to place his position on time
and transcendence in the context of changes which have been going on in

15 Neville, “Confucian Modernity,” 420 ff.

16 Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “Time, Transcendence in Islamic Thought and an Embrace of
‘Catholic Modernity’,” NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion 75, no. 3/4 (October 2021):
429-440.

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the Muslim world, but not only there. I mentioned these in my discussion of
David’s paper. The changes in question concern the growing trend to draft
religious or confessional identities as markers of political mobilization, in
a context of struggle, and in the face of supposed threats to the integrity,
or freedom of a given society. I mentioned above Eastern Europe, but this
applies also to one wing of American evangelicals, who see their faith
as central to their American identity, and vigorously fight to “take back
America” from its thralldom to an alien liberalism. And we see it also in
certain Buddhist societies, such as Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar, where
the threat is supposed to be internal, emanating from minorities, Tamil
and Muslim, respectively. Of course, not all Sinhalese have gone along
with this scapegoating (unfortunately, holdouts are rarer in Burma), but
the remarkable and regrettable fact is that in both countries, monks have
been crucial agents of xenophobic recruitment.
As mentioned above, this is also happening on a lesser scale in the former
Christendom, where however, the mobilizers of resistance are often not
the most pious, to put it mildly. We can think of Viktor Orban in Hungary,
and even more the atheist Milosevic, mobilizing the Serb Orthodox, and
invoking the battle of Kosovo Polje, the traumatic Serb defeat at the hands
of the Ottoman Turks. But the more pious are not absent from this kind of
politics: witness the Republican candidate in the last French Presidential
election, François Fillon, a spokesman of the Catholic right, appealing to
Islamophobia (which is, alas, a potent vote-getter in France).
And this shift towards political mobilization has also been happening
in Islam. I mentioned the case of Pakistan, but it is also the case that the
widely felt need in the Arab world to resist the domination of the former
colonial powers, and more recently of the United States, the major protector
of Israel, right or wrong, which resistance used to find expression through
“secular” parties (Nasser’s Arab Socialism, and Baathists), has been taken
over by various forms of Islamism, including the most violent. And of course,
within Islam, the narrowness of Saudi Wahhabism, faced with the political
militancy of post-Khomeini Iran, is leading to a murderous battle between
Sunni and Shi’a which is taking a vicious toll in Yemen today.
As I argued above, the more a faith becomes a marker of this kind of
mobilization, the more its center of gravity shifts. A marker requires clear
criteria of who is in and who is out, who is on board, and who is ready to
desert the ship; and we find these in conformity or not with unambiguous
rules. In the Islamic case, these usually become conformity with the sharia,
but conceived as unchanging, immune from adjustment through ijtihad,
going right back to the first generation of the followers of the prophet.

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What gets side-lined are all those aspects of Islamic faith which concern
the search for spiritual growth and which have been developed to a great
extent in the different forms of Sufism. So it is not surprising that various
forms of politically militant Islam have often been very suspicious of Sufi
piety, and this has led to attacks on Sufi shrines and mosques by Jihadi
groups, for instance, in Pakistan.
Now Bachir’s account of dahriya as humanity’s “natural forgetfulness,”
and religion as “remembrance” of who we are and who we have to become,
plainly belongs to that dimension of religious life that I described above
as the search for spiritual growth. And it is not surprising to read that his
sources for his view include Jalal ad-Din Rumi, founder of the Mevlevi
tradition; and Muhammad Iqbal,17 whose background lies in Kashmiri Sufism.
Indeed, Iqbal’s pioneering thought in the first part of the last century laid
the basis for a very different kind of “modern Islam” to the one which is now
promoting violence and persecution in various parts of the world. The strange
irony is that this Islam, driven by the very modern practice of political
mobilization around an unambiguous marker, sees itself as primordial,
reproducing faithfully in the 21st century the faith of the seventh century.
I have to confess to a great sympathy with Bachir’s position, which I see
as parallel in certain ways to mine. That is because my (normative) concep-
tion of Catholic modernity has an important place for what I have called,
following Wuthnow, “seekers,” people who are looking for paths of spiritual
growth; whereas Catholics who are appalled at the decline of Christendom,
while I share many of their feelings, very often want to reject such seekers
in the name of a clear def inition of Catholicism in terms of obedience
to rules, very often those concerning sexuality and gender—issues like
contraception, abortion, homosexuality (here, of course, there is overlap with
Islamist concerns for women’s dress, and—in Saudi Arabia—even minimal
freedom for women). And when this defense of Christendom enters politics,
it becomes even more rigid and extreme: witness the interventions of US
Catholic bishops in support of the steadily deteriorating Republican Party.
There is thus an analogous struggle within each faith community, for
all the great differences between them, between highly rule-governed
readings, and those which stress spiritual growth, and what Bachir calls
“remembrance,” which very often takes new forms, and proffers new defini-
tions (as Bachir’s paper does in relation to dahriya).

17 One of Bachir’s earlier works, Islam and the Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the
Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal (Dakar: Codesria, 2010), gives a clear account of this exceptional
thinker, who has been too much neglected in recent decades.

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Moreover, the outcome of these struggles for the “soul” of each faith is not
without importance to our planetary future, insofar as the rule-governed
in each are often engaged in stoking up hostility and even conflict with the
other, through Islamophobia on one side, and rejection of “Crusaders” on the
other; whereas a widespread feature of seekers in our day is their ecumenical
spirit. Who wins the struggle within each, and how convincingly, will have
a palpable effect on the level of violence in the world we are handing on to
our children. Since violence breeds violence, jihadis and islamophobes are
(objectively) on the same side, whatever their feelings about each other.
But by the same token, Bachir and I are also on the same side against them,
something I am happy to recognize.

I read Jonathan Boyarin’s rich paper18 with a mixture of agreement, perplex-

ity (at some of his takes on my writings) and absorbed interest (at the original
characterization of his own position). But the basic background of the whole
reaction was agreement; that is, on where we are now: a parlous situation, in
Western civilization, and, partly for this reason, a parlous situation globally.
Democracy is undergoing deterioration and this partly because the fraught
and complicated relation between democracy and capitalism has plunged
back into the danger zone, from which social democracy hoped to extract it
in the wake of the Second World War, almost as if we had all read and taken
to heart Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation.19 We can only emerge from this
downward spiral as a result of a wide collaboration between people who
come from and are inspired by a great variety of beliefs, outlooks, moral
sources, whether these are “secular,” or “religious,” or as Boyarin holds of
his own belonging, neither of the above. In the political domain, what we
are looking for is what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus.” This is
our “modern” predicament, in the sense, as Boyarin puts it of “the era in
which we live now,” rather than the supersessionist sense, of the highest
achievement of humanity. It is in this former sense that I want to use the
term, and certainly was using it in the Catholic Modernity paper.

18 Jonathan Boyarin, “Out of the Depths of Modernity. Fragments of a Response to Charles

Taylor’s ‘A Catholic Modernity?’ in a Jewish Idiom,” NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of
Religion 75, no. 3/4 (October 2021): 441-464.
19 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New
York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).

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Another feature of Western modernity in this sense is that it has evolved

away from Christendom. By “Christendom,” I mean a society or civilization
in which all aspects of life, politics, art, architecture, music, folkways, are
meant to be informed in some way or other by Christian faith and a Christian
outlook. Western Europe was undeniably a Christendom in this sense, as
Byzantium, Russia, and much of Eastern Europe and the Near East was
another. Towards this development, I want to take a double stance: a) it
is irresistible; it can’t be rolled back; and b) while we may point to losses,
there are undoubted gains.
As Boyarin says, “A Catholic Modernity” was certainly a move in a “pa-
rochial” conversation. It was a normative move, to the effect that this new
(non-Christendom) mode of existence shouldn’t be seen as a falling off, a
decline, or loss of an essential feature of a good society—the way we (rightly)
feel when we see Trump, Orban, Kaczynski taking over democratic societies.
Rather, for reasons (a) and (b), it should be accepted as a new context, with
important new possibilities for the faith, but which called for a different
way of being Catholic than the one we had become accustomed to in our
(Western) history. Hence the invocation of the Ricci mission. The goal was
to justify a certain way of being Catholic in face of an important resistance
in the Magisterium against what they judged to be illegitimate deviation,
even though this way could find much justification in the decisions of the
Second Vatican Council. One could even argue that some of this resistance
was inspired by the First Vatican Council.
The crucial feature of this new non-Christendom predicament was that it
can make possible a new basis for the co-existence of religious, non-religious,
anti-religious, spiritual, etc., stances and identities, one which no longer
classes them as majorities and minorities. This classification is something
which Christendom undoubtedly did, and in a sense couldn’t avoid. There
were those who were fully part of this enterprise of sustaining the order,
and then resident aliens, as it were. Something similar is true of societies
in the Islamic world. This secondary status could be more or less severe or
liveable. The terms for that were more or less “tolerant.” Whereas a regime
of rights in the modern sense is not hospitable to talk of “toleration,” which
carries the implication that there is something difficult and disturbing in
some class of people, which one generously decides to put up with. In modern
pluralist society, on the other hand, the beneficiaries of such a stance can
say: “what do you mean, you’ll ‘tolerate’ me; it’s my right.”
Of course, this is one of the neuralgic points of our contemporary de-
mocracies, one of the ways they are all too rapidly degenerating. We have
great trouble living up to the standards of a society founded on rights.

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Even in the religious sphere, which we “moderns” (a term often used in the
achievement sense that Boyarin distinguished) have supposedly separated
from the mechanisms of power, “secularist” (or “laic”) regimes often load the
dice, either against religion as such, as in the case of French-style “laïcité,”
or against certain religions which are not part of our “heritage” (as we see
with the wave of Islamophobia in a host of different Western countries).
If I may be permitted a fragment of traditional Christian rhetoric, the “old
Adam” dies hard.
And of course, the idea of Christendom was inherently informed by
supersessionism in relation to what was seen as “Judaism.” And one could
argue that the modern (achievement) stance towards “religion” represents
the revenge of history against Christianity for its supersessionism. Because
once you anchor your outlook deeply enough in that kind of move, it is open
to being applied in new ways.
But all this shouldn’t make us underestimate the temptations to exclusion
which are implicit in modern societies whose legitimacy is based on their
being the expression of a “people,” whether they are democratic or not.
One can meet devotees of the BJP in India who tell you in one breath that
“Hinduism” is not intolerant like those awful “Abrahamic” faiths, and in the
next that Muslims threaten “Hindutva.”
One of the points of the Catholic modernity essay was that the Chris-
tian faith is not essentially linked to the Christendom model. Millions of
Christians today, in India, China, Africa are living their faith in a context
where this model makes no sense whatever. And we in the West, aspiring to
sustain democracies based on human rights, have to get beyond that model.
We also have to get beyond our supersessionist mind-set. One could just
as easily argue that Talmudic Judaism “supersedes” an earlier form centered
on the temple and sacrifice. But in fact all faiths evolve in different ways.
One last note, to prevent misunderstandings. My objections to an ethic
based on moral rules was not because I think that we make too much of the
notion of obligation—although I think that Bernard Williams had a point
here. It was that I believe our moral outlooks don’t make sense without
complementary notions of the good life. It was partly a “back-to-Aristotle”
point, if that’s not too simple a characterization.
I remain somewhat bemused and uncertain, in the face of the great
number of interesting points that Boyarin raises, but I hope I have clarified
some of the positions I’ve been defending.

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