Table Of ContentSophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy
of Traditions and Cultures 5
Matthew Sharpe
Dylan Nickelson E ditors
Secularisations
and Their
Debates
Perspectives on the Return of Religion
in the Contemporary West
Secularisations and Their Debates
Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy
of Traditions and Cultures
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The University of Melbourne, Australia; University of California, Berkeley CA, USA
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Matthew Sharpe (cid:129) Dylan Nickelson
Editors
Secularisations and Their
Debates
Perspectives on the Return of Religion
in the Contemporary West
Editors
Matthew Sharpe Dylan Nickelson
Philosophy Philosophy
Deakin University Deakin University
Waurn Ponds , VIC , Australia Waurn Ponds , VIC , Australia
ISBN 978-94-007-7115-4 ISBN 978-94-007-7116-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7116-1
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Contents
Part I Secularizations
1 Introduction: Secularization and Its Discontents ................................ 3
Matthew Sharpe and Dylan Nickelson
2 Disenchantments of Secularism: The West and India ......................... 21
Purushottama Bilimoria
3 Locke, Secularism and the Justice of the Secular Solution:
Towards a Self- Refl ective Transcending of Secular-Self
Understanding ......................................................................................... 39
Philip Andrew Quadrio
Part II Church and State
4 Marx and the Christian Logic of the Secular State ............................. 61
Roland Boer
5 Spirit Matters: Life After Secularism and Religion? ........................... 75
Johann Rossouw
Part III Radical Orthodoxy
6 Counter-Secularism: Parsing the Theological Cure
for Our Modern Malady ......................................................................... 93
Dylan Nickelson
7 ‘In the Beginning Was … the Story’? On Secularization,
Narrative, and Nominalisms .................................................................. 109
Matthew Sharpe
v
vi Contents
Part IV New Atheism and the Post-Secular Theoretical Turn
8 Enjoy Your Enlightenment! New Atheism, Fanaticism
and the Pleasures of (Other People’s) Illusions .................................... 131
Bryan Cooke
9 Against Fundamentalism: The Silence of the Divine
in the Work of Karen Armstrong ........................................................... 153
Petra Brown
10 Secularism Stuck in the End-Times: From Alexandre Kojève
to the Recent Messianic Turn ................................................................. 171
Rory Jeffs
Part V The Secular Age or Post-Secularism
11 Charles Taylor’s Search for Transcendence: Mystery,
Suffering, Violence .................................................................................. 199
John Rundell
12 Towards Post-Secular Enlightenment ................................................... 217
Wayne Hudson
Index ................................................................................................................. 233
Part I
Secularizations
1
Introduction: Secularization
and Its Discontents
Matthew Sharpe and Dylan Nickelson
Sigmund Freud ’s 1 927 work T he Future of Illusion expresses the great
psychoanalyst’s most whiggish assessment of the situation of Western,
post-enlightenment societies. In it, Freud reanimates the ancient tradition of the
materialist-Epicurean criticism of religion, with its skepticism concerning all
invisible powers. For Freud, famously, the religious belief in higher, supernatural
deities—particularly, the monotheistic God—represents a wish-fulfi llment and
illusion (Freud 1 927 : 30, 43). This illusion takes its particular shapes from our
earliest childhood experiences of helplessness, and the longing for an all-protecting,
omnibenevolent father. With the progress of science, and its benefi ts in technology,
Freud opined that the period of the cultural pre-eminence of religion in the West
was over. Civilization and its Discontents, written 3 years later, expresses a simi-
larly sceptical assessment of religion. Whether founded in an oceanic, mystical
sentiment of oneness, or the refi ned language of the theologians, religion remains
for Freud ‘patently infantile’ (Freud 1930: 86). Between 1927 and 1930, however,
Freud’s assessment of the wider prospects of modern Kultur shifted, if it did not
entirely reverse. With the fortunes of fascism rising, and the fi rst clouds of renewed
European war forming on the horizon, Freud now argues that the psychological
price demanded by the modern world’s manifold civilizational advances is perhaps
too high. The sexual and aggressive impulses modern society demands subjects
renounce must return in the forms of organized violence, collective and individual
neuroses—and in the same form of unconscious guilt Freud had argued elsewhere
animated the totems and taboos of the great religions (Freud 1913 ). Although
Freud did not draw the conclusion, the logic of his wider K ulturpessimismus points
to the claim that the psychologically deep-set ‘illusions’ of religion could expect a
long and viable future.
M. Sharpe (*) (cid:129) D. Nickelson
Deakin University , B urwood , VIC 3125 , Australia
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
M. Sharpe and D. Nickelson (eds.), Secularisations and Their Debates: Perspectives 3
on the Return of Religion in the Contemporary West, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural
Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 5, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7116-1_1,
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
4 M. Sharpe and D. Nickelson
Whether one accepts Freud ’s metapsychology, or his claims concerning religion,
one thing is clear. In the decades surrounding the turn of the millennium, a new
consensus has emerged that the process of the ‘secularization’ of Western societies
has not proved as inevitable as the Freud of the F uture of an Illusion, and many
Aufklärers , had taken it to be. As several of the contributions to this collection note,
the term ‘secularization’ has a complex history, in which it has accumulated many,
even contradictory, meanings. However, as in Freud’s 1 927 vision of the future of
the West, its predominant meaning in sociological discourse since Emile Durkheim
and Max Weber’s work had been to describe the supposedly inevitable decline in the
cultural centrality, ubiquity, and political power of religious elites, beliefs, institu-
tions, and practices in modern societies: what Peter Berger called the ‘sacred can-
opy’ (Warner 2 010 : 22–26, 29; Gorski and Altinordu 2 008 : 56; cf. Wilson 1 966 ;
Berger 1969 ; Stark and Bainbridge 1 985 ; Stark and Iannaconne 1 994 ; Stark and
Finke 2 000 ). Empirical studies in the UK and elsewhere, drawing on statistics of
church membership and attendance (Brierley 1 998 ; Crockett and Voas 2 006 ; Warner
2 010 : 7–14), have attested again and again to this decline in what some call ‘the
aggregate level of religious demand’ in the West since the mid-nineteenth century
(Fincke and Stark 1998 ; Iannaconne et al. 1997 ). Different theorists have generated
multi-dimensional models to chart the complex processes of secularization.
Secularization is seen as involving simultaneously processes at the ‘macro’ level,
involving the functional differentiation of social subsystems (political, economic,
and cultural) formerly subsumed under ecclesial authority; the ‘meso’ level, encom-
passing the emergence in modern societies of plural religions and denominations
which compete for individuals’ allegiances; and at the ‘micro’ level, wherein indi-
viduals’ religious faith and practices have been privatized, or separated from their
public and professional roles, and public life more generally (Dobbelaere 1 981 ,
1999 , 2002 ; Casanova 1 994 ). These social and institutional changes in turn were the
results of a wider set of developments, which classical secularization theories held
to be profoundly irreversible. Intellectually, the advent of the modern natural sci-
ences in the seventeenth century, the development of biblical hermeneutics and the
historical sciences (Gaukroger 2 008 : 23–24; Warner 2 010 : 18–19), then the success
of Darwinian theory of natural selection, were held to have forever discredited two-
millenia- old Christian accounts of creation, biblical history, and the meaning and
provenance of human lives (e.g.: Warner 2010 : 14–22). Socioculturally, theorists
point to the advent of modern societies characterized by complex divisions of
labour, the expansion of markets which operate with increasing disregard for pro-
vincial divides and loyalties, the proliferation of large, industrialized cities, and the
breakdown of geographically and culturally closed communities (Wilson 1 982 :
153–162), as all over-determining the diminishing signifi cance of religion in the
West (Gorski and Altinordu 2 008 : 57–59; Warner 2 010 : 26–29).
Nevertheless, after reaching its pinnacle in the 1960s and 1970s, this ‘classical’
sociological understanding of secularization today is in decline. The case of Peter
Berger , one of the principal advocates of the classical theory in his 1969 work The
Sacred Canopy , is illustrative here. Berger had earlier argued that religion had long
ceased to provide the ‘sacred canopy’ presiding over all areas of social life. By
