1. Secularisms: Craig Calhoun
“The tacit understanding of citizenship in the modern West has been secular.”

2. Secularizations
The fundamental question for any theory of secularization is how to account for the differences between the US and Western Europe
There is a need to “’provincialize Europe”. It is not the US that is the exception in the modernization story
Even in the West, “the modern ‘secular’ is by no means synonymous with the ‘profane,’ nor is the ‘religious’ synonymous with the modern ‘sacred.’”
The sacred remains identical with ‘the religious’ only in Durkheimian terms (ex: human rights)
“What we are repeatedly observing in the ‘glocal’ media of the global public sphere can be best understood not so much as clashes between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ but, rather, as violent confrontations over ‘the sacred,’ over blasphemous and sacrilegious acts and speeches, and over the profanation of religious and secular taboos.” (64-66)

3. Secularisms Secularism as statecraft doctrine Secularism as ideology
“Some principle of separation between religious and political authority [... This] neither presupposes or needs to entail any ‘theory,’ positive or negative, of ‘religion.’”
If it does have such a theory, it moves into the arena of ideology
Secularism as ideology
Type 1: Philosophical-historical: “secularist theories of religion grounded in some progressive stadial philosophies of history that relegate religion to a superseded age.”
Marx
Type 2: Political: “theories that propose that religion is either an irrational force or a nonrational form of discourse that should be banished from the democratic public sphere” (66-67)
Early Rawls, early Habermas

4. Ideological Secularism
Western Europeans
tend to embrace a stadial view of history, in which to be modern is “to leave religion behind, to emancipate oneself from religion, overcoming the nonrational forms of being, thinking, and feeling associated with religion.
“It also means growing up, becoming mature, becoming autonomous, thinking and acting on one’s own. It is precisely this assumption that secular people think and act on their own and are rational autonomous free agents, while religious people somehow are unfree, heteronomous, nonrational agents that constitutes the foundational premise of secularist ideology.” (68)
Americans, less influenced by the stadial view of history, see little conflict between religion and modernity (68)

5. Political Secularism
Does not tend to make the same set of assumptions about religion as ideological secularism, and may even value it as a positive force
“But political secularism would like to contain religion within its own differentiated ‘religious’ sphere and would like to maintain a secular public democratic sphere.”
“But the fundamental question is how the boundaries are drawn and by whom.” (69)

6. Political Secularism
“Political secularism falls easily into secularist ideology when the political arrogates for itself absolute, sovereign, quasi-sacred, quasi-transcendent character or when the secular arrogates for itself the mantle of rationality and universality, while claiming that ‘religion’ is essentially nonrational, particularistic, and intolerant (or illiberal)” and thus a threat to democratic politics.
In western Europe in 1998 (pre-9/11), more than 2/3 of every country agreed that religion is “intolerant” and “creates conflict”
Ahistorical: none of the ideologies that wracked western Europe in the 20th century were religious
This idea “has the function of positively differentiating modern secular European from ‘the religious other’” (premodern, religious Europeans, modern non-Europeans, esp. Muslims) (69-70)

7. Religion & Democracy
The First Amendment has two clauses: “no establishment” and “free exercise” of religion
Both of these are necessary for a coexistence of religion and democracy. Where there is no established (i.e. state, compulsory) church, politics and religion can have a friendly, rather than hostile separation of religion from democratic governance
“Disestablishment becomes a necessary condition for democracy whenever an established religion claims monopoly over a state territory, impedes the free exercise of religion, and undermines equal rights or access to all citizens.” (71-72)

8. Religion & Democracy
“Ultimately, the question is whether secularism is an end in itself, an ultimate value, or a means to some other end, be it democracy and equal citizenship or religious (i.e., normative) pluralism.”
If it is not an end in itself, “then it ought to be constructed in such a way that it maximizes the equal participation of all citizens in democratic politics and the free exercise of religion in society.” (72)

9. Religion & Citizenship (Taylor)
“The main issue was once religious diversity. Faith was assumed, but conflicts of faith undermined political cohesion. Some governments sought national cohesion through religious conformity, others by limiting the public role of religion.”
“Today the issue is often faith itself. This arises not only with regard to public funding of religion but also with the question of whether religious arguments have a legitimate place in public debates.” (75)
How is democratic politics to deal with religious arguments? What limits are just, how should they be imposed, and who should decide?
Are arguments based in faith appropriate to public discourse? Can they be appealed to, modified, and developed by argument, logic & evidence?

10. Religion & Citizenship
Do limitations on religious reasons in the sphere of public debate make the public sphere more inclusive, by only allowing reasoning accessible to all, or do they make it more exclusive, prohibiting religious people from participating?
Reflective of anxieties about religion and anxieties about particular religions?
Example: Muslim immigrants in Europe, opposition to construction of Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero
Any understanding of cosmopolitan, universal debate that fails to understand the role of religion in the lives of individuals and societies is badly limited
“Seeing religion as a fully legitimate part of a public life is a specific version of seeing culture and deep moral commitments as legitimate—and, indeed, necessary—features of even the most rational and critical public discourse.” (76)

11. Religion in the Public Sphere
“Public life at even the most cosmopolitan of scales is not an escape from ethnic, national, religious, or other culture but a form of culture-making in which these can be brought into new relationships.”
“Religion appears in liberal theory first and foremost as an occasion for tolerance and neutrality. This orientation is reinforced by:
A) the classification of religion as an essentially private matter
B) an ‘epistemic’ approached to religion shaped by the attempt to assess true and false knowledge
C) The notion that a clear and unbiased distinction is available between the religious and the secular, and
D) the view that religion is in some sense a ‘survival’ from an earlier era, not a field of vital growth within modernity.” (77)

12. Religion in the Public Sphere
“Each of these reinforcements is problematic. So, while the virtues of tolerance are real, the notion that matters of religion can otherwise be excluded from the public sphere is not sustainable.”
Demanding that religion be relegated to the private sphere imagines that citizens somehow “exist distinctly in private and public realms.”
More, religion has never been entirely private (ex: CRM)
“None of us actually escapes cultural and other motivations and resources for our intellectual perspectives; none of us is perfectly articulate about all of our moral sources (though we may struggle to gain clarity.)”
At some point, everybody fails to answer “why” they believe a thing
This blurs the line between secular and religious (77-78)

13. Religion in the Public Sphere
The ways in which people can be guaranteed the right to practice their own religion and to be spared the religious practices of others cannot be determined and settled in private
To exclude religion is often to privilege a group, as with secular Europeans and religious Muslim immigrants, or more religious groups like African-Americans and Latino Catholics in the US (81)

14. Religion in the Public Sphere
It is difficult to demand that religious people use only non-religious reasons in public debate
How does one distinguish between the two? A sharp distinction may exist only for the nonreligious
What’s needed is a translation of reasons
Not in the sense of merely changing words, as reasons may be embedded in cultural or experiential contexts
‘Translation’ “as a metaphor for the activity of becoming able to understand the arguments of another”
Getting “where they’re coming from”
“Where really basic issues are at stake, it is often the case that mutual understanding cannot be achieved without change in one or both of the parties. By participating in relationships with one another, including by pursuing rational mutual understanding, we open ourselves to becoming somewhat different people. The same is true at collective levels” (82-86)
Putnam & Campbell

15. Religion in the Public Sphere
“Such cultures of integration are historically produced bases for the solidarity of citizens.” (my emphasis)
“What is required is a practical orientation rather than an agreement regarding the truth.”
“In the absence of the uniting bond of civic solidarity, which cannot be legally enforced, citizens do not perceive themselves as free and equal participants in the shared practices of democratic opinion and will formation wherein they owe one another reasons for their political statements and attitudes.” (87-88)