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The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms
José Casanova
Rethinking secularism requires that we keep in mind the basic analytical distinction
between “the secular” as a central modern epistemic category, “secularization”
as an analytical conceptualization of modern world-historical processes,
and “secularism” as a worldview and ideology. All three concepts are obviously
related but are used very differently in various academic-disciplinary and sociopolitical
and cultural contexts. I propose to differentiate the three concepts
simply as a way of distinguishing analytically in an exploratory manner among
three different phenomena, without any attempt to reify them as separate
realities.1
The secular has become a central modern category—theological-philosophical,
legal-political, and cultural-anthropological—to construct, codify,
grasp, and experience a realm or reality differentiated from “the religious.”
Phenomenologically, one can explore the different types of “secularities” as
they are codified, institutionalized, and experienced in various modern contexts
and the parallel and correlated transformations of modern “religiosities”
and “spiritualities.” It should be obvious that “the religious” and “the
secular” are always and everywhere mutually constituted. Yet while the social
sciences have dedicated much effort to the scientific study of religion, the task
of developing a reflexive anthropology and sociology of the secular is only
now beginning.
Secularization, by contrast, usually refers to actual or alleged empiricalhistorical
patterns of transformation and differentiation of “the religious”
(ecclesiastical institutions and churches) and “the secular” (state, economy, science,
art, entertainment, health and welfare, etc.) institutional spheres from
early-modern to contemporary societies. Within the social sciences, particularly
within sociology, a general theory of secularization was developed that
conceptualized these at first modern European and later increasingly globalized
historical transformations as part and parcel of a general teleological and
The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms 55
progressive human and societal development from the primitive “sacred” to the
modern “secular.” The thesis of the “decline” and the “privatization” of religion
in the modern world became central components of the theory of secularization.
Both the decline and the privatization theses have undergone numerous critiques
and revisions in the last fifteen years. But the core of the theory—the understanding
of secularization as a single process of differentiation of the various
institutional spheres or subsystems of modern societies, understood as the paradigmatic
and defining characteristic of processes of modernization—remains
relatively uncontested in the social sciences, particularly within sociology.
Secularism refers more broadly to a whole range of modern secular worldviews
and ideologies which may be consciously held and explicitly elaborated
into philosophies of history and normative-ideological state projects, into projects
of modernity and cultural programs, or, alternatively, it may be viewed as
an epistemic knowledge regime that may be held unreflexively or be assumed
phenomenologically as the taken-for-granted normal structure of modern
reality, as a modern doxa or an “unthought.” Moreover, modern secularism
also comes in multiple historical forms, in terms of different normative models
of legal-constitutional separation of the secular state and religion; or in terms
of the different types of cognitive differentiation among science, philosophy,
and theology; or in terms of the different models of practical differentiation
among law, morality, and religion, and so on.
This chapter presents an analytical elaboration of each of these concepts
and some of the phenomenological experiences, institutional arrangements,
historical processes, constitutional frameworks, and normative-ideological projects
to which they refer.
The Secular
The secular is often assumed to be simply the other of the religious, that which
is nonreligious. In this respect, it functions simply as a residual category. But
paradoxically, in our modern secular age and in our modern secular world, the
secular has come to encompass increasingly the whole of reality, in a sense
replacing the religious. Consequently, the secular has come to be increasingly
perceived as a natural reality devoid of religion, as the natural social and
anthropological substratum that remains when the religious is lifted or disappears.
This is the conception or epistemic attitude that Charles Taylor has critically
characterized as “subtraction theories.”2
The paradox resides in the fact that rather than being a residual category, as
was originally the case, the secular appears now as reality tout court, while the
religious is increasingly perceived not only as the residual category, the other of
the secular, but also as a superstructural and superfluous additive, which both
humans and societies can do without.
56 Rethinking Secularism
Theories of secularization have emerged as explanatory conceptions of this
process of differentiation and liberation of the secular from the religious, understood
as a universal world-historical process, while secularist worldviews
function as justificatory explanations of the paradoxical inversion in the dyadic
relation of the religious and the secular, vindicating not only the primacy of the
secular over the religious but also the superseding of the religious by the secular.
Both function as uncritical and unreflexive ideologies insofar as they disregard,
indeed mask, the particular and contingent historicity of the process, projecting
it onto the level of universal human development. Moreover, by postulating the
secular as the natural and universal substratum that emerges once the superstructural
religious addition is lifted, theories of secularization, as well as secularist
social science, have avoided the task of analyzing, studying, and explaining
the secular, or the varieties of secular experience, as if it is only the religious, but
not the secular, that is in need of interpretation and analytical explanation.
Any discussion of the secular has to begin with the recognition that it
emerged first as a theological category of Western Christendom that has no
equivalent in other religious traditions or even in Eastern Christianity.
Originally, the Latin world saeculum, as in per saecula saeculorum, only meant
an indefinite period of time. But eventually, it became one of the terms of a
dyad, religious/secular, that served to structure the entire spatial and temporal
reality of medieval Christendom into a binary system of classification separating
two worlds, the religious-spiritual-sacred world of salvation and the
secular-temporal-profane world. Hence the distinction between the “religious”
or regular clergy, who withdrew from the world into the monasteries to lead a
life of Christian perfection, and the “secular” clergy, who lived in the world
along with the laity.
In its original theological meaning, to secularize meant to “make worldly,” to
convert religious persons or things into secular ones, as when a religious person
abandoned the monastic rule to live in the saeculum or when monastic property
was secularized following the Protestant Reformation. This is the original
Christian theological meaning of the term “secularization”that may serve, however,
as the basic metaphor of the historical process of Western secularization.
In fact, the historical process of secularization needs to be understood as a
particular reaction to the structuring dualism of medieval Christendom, as an
attempt to bridge, eliminate, or transcend the dualism between the religious and
the secular world. In this respect, the very existence of the binary system of
classification served to determine the dynamics of the process of secularization.
Even within the Christian West, however, this process of secularization follows
two different dynamics.
One is the dynamic of internal Christian secularization that aims to spiritualize
the temporal and to bring the religious life of perfection out of the monasteries
into the secular world, so that everybody may become “a secular ascetic
monk,” a perfect Christian in the saeculum. Such a dynamic tends to transcend
The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms 57
the dualism by blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular,
by making the religious secular and the secular religious through mutual
reciprocal infusion. This was the path initiated by the various medieval movements
of Christian reform of the saeculum, which was radicalized by the
Protestant Reformation and has attained its paradigmatic expression in the
Anglo-Saxon Calvinist cultural area, particularly in the United States.
The other different, indeed almost opposite, dynamic of secularization takes
the form of laicization. It aims to emancipate all secular spheres from clericalecclesiastical
control, and in this respect, it is marked by a laic/clerical antagonism.
Unlike in the Protestant path, however, here the boundaries between the
religious and the secular are rigidly maintained, but those boundaries are
pushed into the margins, aiming to contain, privatize, and marginalize everything
religious, while excluding it from any visible presence in the secular public
sphere. When the secularization of monasteries took place in Catholic countries,
first during the French Revolution and later in subsequent liberal revolutions,
the explicit purpose of breaking the monastery walls was not to bring the
religious life of perfection into the secular world, as had been the case with the
Protestant Reformation, but rather to laicize those religious places, dissolving
and emptying their religious content and making the religious persons, monks
and nuns, civil and laic before forcing them into the world, now conceived as
merely a secular place emptied of religious symbols and religious meanings.
This is precisely the realm of laïcité, a sociopolitical sphere freed from religious
symbols and clerical control. Such a path of laicization, which is paradigmatic
of the French-Latin-Catholic cultural area, although it found diverse manifestations
throughout continental Europe, could well serve as the basic metaphor
of all subtraction narratives of secular modernity, which tend to understand
the secular as merely the space left behind when this-worldly reality is freed
from religion.
With many variations, these are the two main dynamics of secularization
that culminate in our secular age. In different ways, both paths lead to an overcoming
of the medieval Christian dualism through a positive affirmation and
revaluation of the saeculum, that is, of the secular age and the secular world,
imbuing the immanent secular world with a quasi-transcendent meaning as the
place for human flourishing. In this broad sense of the term “secular,” that of
“living in the secular world and within the secular age,” we are all secular, and
all modern societies are secular and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable
future, one could almost say per saecula saeculorum.
There is a second, narrower meaning of the term “secular,” that of selfsufficient
and exclusive secularity, when people are simply “irreligious,” that is,
devoid of religion and closed to any form of transcendence beyond the purely
secular immanent frame. Here, secular is no longer one of the units of a dyadic
pair but is constituted as a self-enclosed reality. To a certain extent, this constitutes
one possible end result of the process of secularization, of the attempt to
58 Rethinking Secularism
overcome the dualism between religious and secular, by freeing oneself of the
religious component altogether.
In his recent work A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has reconstructed the process
through which the phenomenological experience of what he calls “the
immanent frame” becomes constituted as an interlocking constellation of the
modern differentiated cosmic, social, and moral orders. All three orders—
the cosmic, the social, and the moral—are understood as purely immanent
secular orders, devoid of transcendence and thus functioning etsi Deus non
daretur, “as if God would not exist.” It is this phenomenological experience
that, according to Taylor, constitutes our age paradigmatically as a secular one,
irrespective of the extent to which people living in this age may still hold religious
or theistic beliefs.3
The question is whether the phenomenological experience of living within
such an immanent frame is such that people within it will also tend to function
etsi Deus non daretur. Taylor is inclined to answer this question in the affirmative.
Indeed, his phenomenological account of the secular “conditions” of belief is
meant to explain the change from a Christian society around 1500 CE in which
belief in God was unchallenged and unproblematic, indeed “naïve” and taken
for granted, to a post-Christian society today in which belief in God not only is
no longer axiomatic but also becomes increasingly problematic, so that even
those who adopt an “engaged”standpoint as believers tend to experience reflexively
their own belief as an option among many others, one moreover requiring
an explicit justification. Secularity, being without religion, by contrast tends to
become increasingly the default option, which can be naïvely experienced as
natural and, thus, no longer in need of justification.
This naturalization of “unbelief” or “nonreligion” as the normal human
condition in modern societies corresponds to the assumptions of the dominant
theories of secularization, which have postulated a progressive decline of religious
beliefs and practices with increasing modernization, so that the more
modern a society is, the more secular, the less “religious,” it is supposed to
become. That the decline of religious beliefs and practices is a relatively recent
meaning of the term “secularization” is indicated by the fact that it does not yet
appear in the dictionaries of most modern European languages.
The fact that there are some modern non-European societies, such as the
United States or South Korea, that are fully secular in the sense that they
function within the same immanent frame and yet their populations are also at
the same time conspicuously religious, or the fact that the modernization of so
many non-Western societies is accompanied by processes of religious revival,
should put into question the premise that the decline of religious beliefs and
practices is a quasi-natural consequence of processes of modernization. If
modernization per se does not produce necessarily the progressive decline of
religious beliefs and practices, then we need a better explanation for the radical
and widespread secularity one finds among the populations of most western
The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms 59
European societies. Secularization in this second meaning of the term “secular,”
that of being “devoid of religion,” does not happen automatically as a result of
processes of modernization or even as the result of the social construction of a
self-enclosed immanent frame, but it needs to be mediated phenomenologically
by some other particular historical experience.
Self-sufficient secularity, that is, the absence of religion, has a better chance
of becoming the normal taken-for-granted position if it is experienced not as
an unreflexively naïve condition, as just a fact, but actually as the meaningful
result of a quasi-natural process of development. As Taylor has pointed out,
modern unbelief is not simply a condition of absence of belief or merely indifference.
It is a historical condition that requires the perfect tense, “a condition
of ‘having overcome’ the irrationality of belief.”4
Intrinsic to this phenomenological
experience is a modern “stadial consciousness,” inherited from the
Enlightenment, which understands this anthropocentric change in the conditions
of belief as a process of maturation and growth, as a “coming of age,”
and as progressive emancipation. For Taylor, this stadial phenomenological
experience serves, in turn, to ground the phenomenological experience of
exclusive humanism as the positive self-sufficient and self-limiting affirmation
of human flourishing and as the critical rejection of transcendence beyond
human flourishing as self-denial and self-defeating.
In this respect, the historical self-understanding of secularism has the
function of confirming the superiority of our present modern secular outlook
over other supposedly earlier and therefore more primitive religious forms of
understanding. To be secular means to be modern, and therefore, by implication,
to be religious means to be somehow not yet fully modern. This is the
ratchet effect of a modern historical stadial consciousness, which turns the very
idea of going back to a surpassed condition into an unthinkable intellectual
regression.
The function of secularism as a philosophy of history, and thus as ideology,
is to turn the particular Western Christian historical process of secularization
into a universal teleological process of human development from belief to
unbelief, from primitive irrational or metaphysical religion to modern rational
postmetaphysical secular consciousness. Even when the particular role of
internal Christian developments in the general process of secularization is
acknowledged, it is in order to stress the universal significance of the uniqueness
of Christianity as, in Marcel Gauchet’s expressive formulation, “the religion
to exit from religion.”5
I would like to propose that this secularist stadial consciousness is a crucial
factor in the widespread secularization that has accompanied the modernization
of western European societies. Europeans tend to experience their
own secularization, that is, the widespread decline of religious beliefs and
practices in their midst, as a natural consequence of their modernization. To
be secular is experienced not as an existential choice that modern individuals
60 Rethinking Secularism
or modern societies make but, rather, as a natural outcome of becoming
modern. In this respect, the theory of secularization mediated through this
historical stadial consciousness tends to function as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is, in my view, the presence or absence of this secularist historical stadial
consciousness that explains when and where processes of modernization are
accompanied by radical secularization. In places where such secularist historical
stadial consciousness is absent or less dominant, as in the United States
or in most non-Western postcolonial societies, processes of modernization
are unlikely to be accompanied by processes of religious decline. On the contrary,
they may be accompanied by processes of religious revival.
Following this reconstruction one may distinguish three different ways of
being secular: (a) that of mere secularity, that is, the phenomenological experience
of living in a secular world and in a secular age, where being religious may
be a normal viable option; (b) that of self-sufficient and exclusive secularity, that
is, the phenomenological experience of living without religion as a normal,
quasi-natural, taken-for-granted condition; and (c) that of secularist secularity,
that is, the phenomenological experience not only of being passively free but
also actually of having been liberated from “religion” as a condition for human
autonomy and human flourishing.
Secularizations
In the book Public Religions in the Modern World, I proposed to disaggregate
analytically what was usually taken to be one single theory of secularization
into three disparate and not necessarily interrelated components or subtheses,
namely, (a) the theory of the institutional differentiation of the so-called secular
spheres, such as state, economy, and science, from religious institutions and
norms; (b) the theory of the progressive decline of religious beliefs and practices
as a concomitant of levels of modernization; and (c) the theory of privatization
of religion as a precondition of modern secular and democratic politics.6
Such an analytical distinction makes possible the testing of each of the three
subtheses separately as different empirically falsifiable propositions.
Since in Europe the three processes of secular differentiation, privatization
of religion, and religious decline have been historically interconnected, there
has been the tendency to view all three processes as intrinsically interrelated
components of a single general teleological process of secularization and modernization,
rather than as particular and contingent developments. In the
United States, by contrast, one finds a paradigmatic process of secular
differentiation, which is not accompanied, however, either by a process of religious
decline or by the confinement of religion to the private sphere. Processes
of modernization and democratization in American society have often been
accompanied by religious revivals, and the wall of separation between church