{"id":1291,"date":"2011-01-18T13:27:48","date_gmt":"2011-01-18T13:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/?p=1291"},"modified":"2011-01-22T19:14:34","modified_gmt":"2011-01-22T19:14:34","slug":"globalist-religion-and-secularism-are-interdependent-in-global-civil-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/2011\/01\/globalist-religion-and-secularism-are-interdependent-in-global-civil-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Globalist: Religion and secularism are interdependent"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>Today one could be forgiven for understanding the religious and the secular as a conversation – or a clash – between two homogeneous terms. This has happened for various reasons but partly because of the frequent media attention given to contesting whether religion is a force for good or bad in the modern world.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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In the West, religious faith, especially theistic faith, is often seen as directing us to an intolerant past, whereas secularism grounds us in individual freedom and orients us towards a hopeful future. The debate has a simple premise, which is that a gradual secularisation of most of the Western world has been realised through a conscious and enlightened distance between church and state – especially after the bloody religious wars of early modern Europe – leading eventually to healthy, liberal democracies. The roots of this go back to the Reformation, about which the Lutheran theologian Peter Berger has written: \u201cProtestantism cut the umbilical cord between heaven and earth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But portraying secularisation as a historical and linear detachment from religion in Europe is too simplistic. Most forms of secularism are not anti-religion but rather anti-theocratic, negating the political power of the church as the one true normative state. Furthermore, as Professor Jos\u00e9 Casanova has pointed out: \u201cNowhere in Europe did religious conflict lead to secularisation, but rather to the confessionalisation of the state and to the territorialisation of religions and peoples.\u201d Secularity has become an integrative feature of religion itself, so that faith in God is not about the negation of this world but about participation in it, or the moral imperative to make things better in the here and now. Today, France is the only Western state that is officially secular, with its particular manifestation of laicit\u00e9 (secularism) born out of a struggle between the state and the Catholic Church.<\/span><\/p>\n

One basic thesis of early social scientists like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber was that, in the modern age, religions would struggle to provide universal world views and that the products of modernity – such as industrialisation, globalisation and individualism – would inevitably impact on religious institutions and on the vitality of religious practices and convictions. One cannot deny this sociological change in our societies. If anything, in our increasingly diverse societies, institutional religion has declined as a cohesive force that gives meaning and stability to communities. Yet the power of theological language can, and is being, used as a tool for opening up communication between faiths and cultures, as well as for attempting to synthesise mainstream dialogue within a faith.<\/span><\/p>\n

For many people, the task is no less than a reconstruction. However much this may seem like an exaggerated claim to make of any faith, the implication is very much that, when it is necessary to rethink whole areas of personal, ethical and political life, this must be viewed as a radical shift in religious consciousness.<\/span><\/p>\n

The real debate is not about religion in itself but whether it is undergoing a revival that could threaten or destabilise the relatively calm public sphere of most Western countries. While I would reject the claim that 9\/11 \u201cbrought religion back\u201d, what it did do was convince many onlookers that religious expression could quite easily be equated with religious fanaticism and that religious fanaticism could have its roots in the interpretation of scriptures held sacred by millions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Globalisation, geopolitics, mass migration and issues of identity and loyalty are some of the crucial factors of this debate. But in an era when it seems almost impossible to have any sustained and measured thinking about issues to do with religion – and more specifically Islam – without becoming embroiled in debates about terrorism and militancy on the one hand, and about conspiracy theories against the whole Muslim world on the other, any serious thinking of the interface between religion and secularism must understand their mutual interdependency in a global civil society.<\/span><\/p>\n

A multiple array of voices and opinions can be responsible for the destruction as well as the flourishing of civil society. To view religious organisations or voices as separate entities from mainstream society perpetuates a narrow but powerful debate. The thinking around civil society in the course of European civilisation is to associate it with liberal philosophy, which pits religious faith against the rational. In this world, the individual is at the centre and for a civil society to develop, the authoritarian sacred must not encroach into the public arena. Many people of religious faith would agree with this view. The religious voice should not be a privileged voice; it is one voice within a plurality of voices.<\/span><\/p>\n

A consistent rhetorical theme of the past few years is that religion should be kept as a private matter, a matter for the individual conscience, because belief in God so often stifles the potential in humans to do good for the whole of state and society. Furthermore, religion is often depicted as either the biggest obstacle or else the biggest solution in the pursuit of global peace. This has been exacerbated in recent years with the visibility of minority faiths, which has brought into question the very value of diversity. The issues of visibility and self-determination reverberate in current debates around the headscarf in France or Turkey\u2019s entry into the EU. Many European citizens of all backgrounds find such differences unsettling to their personal and political identity. We are all part of this debate but there is no simple answer to the soul-searching currently going on in the West.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today one could be forgiven for understanding the religious and the secular as a conversation – or a clash – between two homogeneous terms. This has happened for various reasons but partly because of the frequent media attention given to contesting whether religion is a force for good or bad in the modern world. In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10673,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[64,14,32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10673"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.global-briefing.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}