Is the Secular Tradition All Bad? A Critical Reflection on the State of the Critical Subfield

This paper argues that scholars of religion should treat the secular tradition and its cognate concepts, like secularism and secularity, like we treat other “religious” traditions, i.e., as internally diverse, as a mix of good and bad, and as a source of both help and harm. The paper relies on recent research that has described the political and ethical diversity within secularism, such as Todd Weir’s book, Red Secularism: Socialism and Secularist Culture in Germany 1890 to 1933 (2023). The paper pushes back against the dominant trend of treating “secularism” as a catch-all name for the harms of liberalism, colonialism, technocracy, and even Christianity (such as when scholars elide the differences between Protestant and secular ways of life). The paper’s goal is not to unlink say, empiricism and liberalism, but to recognize that they are not identical and not simply unified under a third sign, secularism. The differences among these concepts are important and meaningful, even if we ultimately consider them related or even imbricated.

The paper begins with some examples from the critique of secularism, primarily from religious studies and anthropology, including the work of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, John Modern, and Peter Coviello. It then compares the critique of secularism with scholarship in sociology that aims for a more descriptive study of secular people, such as that of Ryan Cragun, before turning to work in political science, like that of Jacques Berlinerblau, that explicitly defends secularism. Next, the paper offers a historical analysis of scholarship on secularism and secularity across these fields to show how we got here: a time in which “secular” is generally an epithet among scholars of religion, a neutral descriptor or category to defend among social scientists and legal scholars, and a favorable term for much of the left-leaning public in North America and Europe. This part of the paper compares recent critiques of secularism with twentieth-century conservative religious critiques to consider the consequences of our rhetoric, the strangeness of our bedfellows, and the gap between leftist scholars of religion, leftists scholars in other fields, and everyday leftists.

Ultimately, this paper argues that since secular beliefs, practices, and ways of life are part of a broader, heterogeneous secular tradition, then scholars should approach it like they do any other tradition, such as Christianity or Islam: not inherently bad or good, but indexing specific beliefs, practices, bodily dispositions, etc. In particular, the paper argues that the secular is a "discursive tradition," which is a concept that Asad draws from Michel Foucault and Alasdair MacIntyre to create and then uses to describe Islam. By treating the secular as a discursive tradition that is internally diverse, we can be more specific in our critiques, as well as our defenses, which is imperative in this current moment when partisan lines are being redrawn.

Hopefully this approach can help us resolve some glaring tensions among scholars of religion, who are wary of Christian nationalism, worried about the use and abuse of religious discourse, defensive of religious ways of life, dissatisfied with liberalism, and anxious about the erosion of the separation of church and state. Discussion and even critique of the secular and secularism can be an opportunity to discuss these discontents and the important differences among them if we can recognize the secular tradition’s internal diversity rather than treat “secular” as a pejorative adjective. As scholars we run a real risk of disconnecting ourselves from public ways of speaking so that our sentences will be taken out of context and misunderstood in context. We also risk creating bogeymen of each other's positions when we treat terms like "secular" and "secularism" as shibboleths rather than use them as precise descriptors.