Adrian Hermann (Bonn University)

In the context of the German study of religion, the concept of „multiple secularities“ has been one of the most innovative and exciting new developments of the last 15 years. Among other things, it has been emerged as a response to the various challenges of postcolonial critique of the concept of "religion“ as an analytical category. Alongside the successful implementation of the „multiple secularities“ perspective, the German study of religion has also brought forth the approach of „global religious history“ (Kollmar-Paulenz/Bergunder/Hermann/Strube/Maltese et al.)  In my contribution, I want to relate these two recent innovations to each other and discuss how „multiple secularities“ has contributed and could continue to contribute to a „global religious history“.

Sushmita Nath (Ashoka University)

In 2016 I joined the KFG “Multiple Secularities” as a junior fellow, and then again as a postdoctoral fellow in 2019, where I continued my research until 2021. As this timeline reveals, I was fortunate to have a long association with KFG Multiple Secularities. As a result, the research group had a major influence on my research on secularity in modern India. At the KFG I explored the “Gandhi-Nehru tradition” of secularity, which, as a dominant socio-political ideal during the twentieth century, influenced the Indian national movement as well as the ideal of secularism in the post-colonial state. By distinguishing secularity from secularism and secularisation, and by construing it as an analytical category that distinguishes “religion” from its others, I was able to demonstrate the distinctiveness of the secular ideal of the Gandhi-Nehru tradition vis-à-vis the secular ideal of western Europe and North America. The result of this research was a monograph titled, ‘The Secular Imaginary: Gandhi, Nehru and the Idea(s) of India’, published in 2022. Secondly, my intellectual engagements with the fellows at the KFG reminded me that the case for the distinctiveness of Indian secularity was not an argument for exceptionality. An argument for exception, it may be argued, assumes an authoritative original. By questioning the existence of an authoritative original secular, the notion of multiple secularities challenges accounts where the history of Western Europe and North America serves as such an original. As such, the concept of secularity has been useful for me and my co-author Tobias Berger in writing a paper on the autonomous sources of “liberal” and non-liberal thinking with regards to questions of secularism and secularity in South Asia. Lastly, I see immense possibilities in exploring the conception of secularity in conjunction with recent developments in global (intellectual) history and comparative theorisation. International and inter-disciplinary research environments, such as the KFG Multiple Secularities, are crucial for such intellectual developments.

Todd Weir (University of Groningen)

Premise: Given what we currently know of the conceptual history of worldview, we can posit that concepts such as worldview have been crucial in the elaboration of novel ideas about human knowledge, community, and religious-secular relations in modernity. These concepts have been formed and reflected upon in the context of apologetic struggles between religious-secular viewpoints, which have sometimes been known as “culture wars.” In this process, definitions of worldviews both diverge, as antagonistic claims are made by ascribing contrary prefixes, such as “Christian” versus “scientific” worldviews, as well as converge, given that the participants in the field of contestation themselves seek to define themselves in relation to one another. Furthermore, concepts travel geographically and linguisticlly and enter into new spaces of contestation, which can be observed in the migration of the German term Weltanschauung to Spanish cosmovision in the Latin American context, and now as “cosmovision” in the global Anglosphere.

Relation to Multiple Secularities: The strength of the Multiple Secularities approach is the comparative historical framework it established for analysing religious-secular events and fields. This comparison is both geographic/cultural and chronological. One could extend the above described project on this history of worldview, which I will undertake with support of the Dutch Research Council grant, with a collaborative project that would investigate both historical and contemporary developments of arguments about ontological difference in the context of apologetics of various sorts. It would study the evolution of such arguments discursively and theoretically, one the one hand, as well as liguistically and conceptually, on the other. The premise is that arguments about ontological difference are key sites of the apologetic elaboration of religious-secular boundaries. To take one very current example, it is clear that part of the concept of “Russian world” advanced by the Russian government and Orthodox Church in the current war in Ukraine is the notion that underpinning the conflict is a worldview chasm between Russia and the West.