Secularity and Governance
Saturday, 14 October, 1 - 3 p.m.
Nonreligion in a Complex Future: Rethinking the Secular, Secularism and Secularity
Lori Beaman (University of Ottawa)
Multiple Secularities, Secularism and the Specters of Race
Marian Burchardt (Leipzig University)
Multiple Secularities, Post-Coloniality, and the Indian Conundrum
Anindita Chakrabarti (IIT Kanpur)
Chair: Nur Yasemin Ural (KFG "Multiple Secularities")
Nonreligion in a Complex Future: Rethinking the Secular, Secularism and Secularity
Lori Beaman (University of Ottawa)
The Nonreligion in a Complex Future Project is a 7 year international project that studies the impact of increased nonreligion and increased religious diversity in five research areas: law, education, the environment, health, and migration. The project was designed to explicitly avoid using versions of ‘the secular’ as a placeholder concept to describe social change related to the increase in nonreligion. In our view, much of what we are analysing can be effectively discussed without relying on this overused concept. We share with the Multiple Secularities programme of research a critical approach to the secular, though we differ in our focus. The NCF is not concerned primarily with the social construction of the secular. However, through and because of the approach of Multiple Secularities we have cautiously embarked on a re-engagement with the concept of the secular using the multiple secularities approach as described by Kleine and Wohlrab-Sahr. This approach has been especially helpful in our projects in law, which have examined same-sex marriage as public controversy and the issue of reproductive rights, especially in light of the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the recent Dobbs decision by the United States Supreme Court which prompted an international reaction. Social actors in these debates deploy ‘the secular’ in varyious ways in public debate and in legal settings. Their strategies are embedded in power relations and ideas of the common good. They link to notions of community and nationhood as well as to citizenship and belonging. This paper will examine the NCF research in conversation with the conceptual framework of Multiple Secularities, considering its positive contribution as well as its challenges.
Multiple Secularities, Secularism and the Specters of Race
Marian Burchardt (Leipzig University)
In an important part of the social scientific literature, secularism has been construed as an element of modern statecraft that is intrinsically tied to the histories of Western colonialism and pretension of racial superiority and white supremacy that underpinned it. Such approaches typically construe secularism and secularity as an exclusive element of Western colonial modernity, not as a form of conceptual distinction and institutional differentiation that is possibly universal. Many studies, which work with such an approach lack a clear empirical or historical basis for clarifying the nexus of secularity and race. And generally, while the historical relationship between secularity and other forms of social categorization such as gender, race and ethnicity are undoubtedly central to the research field of multiple secularities, there is a dearth of work. My talk seeks to address this lacuna on a conceptual and empirical level.
While for a long time, sociologists of religion imagined secularization as more or less anonymous process, recent approaches are more actor-centered and view secularization as conflict. In my paper, I contribute to this research by focusing on the civic engagement of secularist activists towards reshaping the relationships between religion and the state. Drawing on empirical research in Quebec and Catalonia, I show that, while understanding their activism as aiming to democratize the governance of religion, secularists often find themselves in caught up between conservatives who seek to preserve the status quo which privileges Christian majority institutions on the one hand, and actors from the ‘multicultural left‘ who blame secularists of undermining the struggle of religious minorities, especially Muslims, and racism. My paper explores this increasingly explosive conjuncture and examines in a comparative fashion the ways in which different institutional arrangements incentivize, curb, or potentially absorb such conflicts.
Multiple Secularities, Post-Coloniality, and the Indian Conundrum
Anindita Chakrabarti (IIT Kanpur)
Much of the recent theorization on the concept of secular has questioned its monolithic and Eurocentric understanding and worked towards an analytical frame that better explained the practices and institutional dynamics associated with it. Much of this scholarship has been situated within the post-colonial contexts untouched by the temporality of the post-secular. How does the idea of secularity/secularism work in these socio-political contexts? The concept of multiple secularities has initiated a discussion beyond the political ideologies of separation between religion and state/politics as it detects a variety of combinations of religion, national politics and the claims of religious groups and secular agents in the public sphere. It frames the debate not around the question whether secularism/secularity are culturally inauthentic and a western import, but how the boundaries between religion and secular spheres are negotiated, challenged, and redrawn. In this presentation I map the secularity debate in India on three key registers: First, the separation of religion and politics/state and its impossibility in the Indian context; second, secularity as rights and justice; third, an increasing judicialization of the question of religion and its aftermath. I argue that the frame of multiple secularities offers not an idea of multicultural relativism but a conceptual tool to identify secularity as a multi-value idea.
My work on Muslim family law in contemporary India has shown how the idea of secularity has shapeshifted in the recent decades as judicialization of the religious domain emerged as the key trope. In this context, the judiciary emerged as the sole arbitrator that determined what was ‘religion’ and what was not. This development has on one hand led to infringement of religious freedom, especially of religious minorities and homogenization of the religious majority. For me, the frame of multiple secularities offers a conceptual toolkit for investigating how the institutional practices and concomitant meaning evolve and change in these post-colonial contexts. In this presentation I will argue that in the contemporary public discourse in India we have seen a clear shift from the guiding principle of ‘balancing religious diversity’/‘principled distance’ to the concept of secularity as ‘subjection of religion to the rule of law’. This idea of secularity couched in the language of justice, constitutional rights, and a uniform civil code has not worked well for the religious minorities as the questions of religious difference and plurality go unasked.
