WHAT COMES AFTER
THE CRITIQUE OF SECULARISM?
SPONSORED BY THE UC BERKELEY
CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF RELIGION
APRIL 13, 2017
PANEL TWO
10:45-12:15: Rival Versions of Secularism in European Political Thought
Moderator: David Bates
Udi Greenberg, “Freedom of Religion, Protestantism, and Catholic Polemics”
Over the last few years, several prominent critics of secularism have focused their attention on
freedom of religion. Europeans and Americans, these scholars claim, have sought to disseminate
their conceptions of religious liberty on the non-Western world, unnecessarily intervening in
complex conflicts (especially in the Middle East) under the guise of promoting religious and
political freedom. Yet according to such critics, such interventions come to tragic end because
the concept of religious liberty is not neutral. Rather, it stems from Protestant conceptions of
religion. Like their Protestant forefathers, so the argument goes, current-day Western leaders
privilege the right of individual belief and worship over all other forms of religious practice.
They are therefore unable to grasp that promoting these ideas in non-Western societies, where
communities and individuals think differently about religion, is bound to be counter-productive.
This paper will claim that despite this critique’s powerful insight, it mischaracterizes the history
of religious freedom. First, Protestants in the modern era rarely focused on individual rights as
the core of religion. Deep into the twentieth century, many assumed that religious freedom
required legal and political mechanisms that would allow collective communities and even the
state to regulate individuals’ religious behavior. This indicates that contemporary focus on
individual rights as the source of religious freedom is a recent shift, a product of contemporary
debates and ideas rather than the core of secularism itself.
Second, it claims that the strong association of Protestantism with individualism was the product
of Catholic polemics in the century before Vatican II. As part of the era’s intense CatholicProtestant struggles, Catholics often portrayed militant secularism and individualism as the
product of Protestant deviation. They described religious liberty, which was formally considered
heresy before the 1960s, as the reincarnation of the Reformation’s assault on Christian unity and
as a key cause for the disintegration of “natural” communities and hierarchies. It is my hope that
in our discussions, we can reflect on the meaning of the overlap between such Catholic
apologetics and contemporary critiques of secularism (which have very different goals), and
perhaps distinguish more clearly between the alternatives they offer for contemporary dilemmas.
James Chappel, “Varieties of Secularism in the Catholic Church: 1930-1960”
The study of the secular is at an impasse. Scholars in “secularism studies” have done a great deal
of important work, to be sure. Like capitalism, and like the nation, secularism has been placed on
the map as one of the coordinates around which modern societies orient themselves. And like
them, secularism has been subjected to the hermeneutics of suspicion. We are now aware of its
repressive, gendered, and exclusionary effects. But has critique, as Latour put it, “run out of
steam”? We can no longer naïvely defend secularism as liberatory, but what are we to put in its
place?
This paper will suggest that the “varieties of secularism” literature provides untapped potential in
this regard. Instead of seeking to peer beyond the minotaur of the secular towards a mystical
post-secular future, scholars might begin to think harder about different kinds of secularism.
Previous typologies of the “varieties of secularism,” provided primarily by political scientists,
have focused on constitutional arrangements, resulting in a rather arid picture of the monumental
process through which religious communities grappled with the secular. Building on my research
on twentieth-century European Catholicism, this paper will argue for a different approach, and
one more in dialogue with the insights of secularism studies.
The question is not only how states recognize religious authorities and law, but how religious
communities themselves articulate the distinction between public rationality and private
religiosity that is at the heart of secularism—an articulation that is centered, due to the nature of
secularism itself, on the explosive questions of gender and the family. Within the Catholic
Church of the twentieth century, two different forms of secularism emerged. The way to
understand the explosive conflicts within the Church between the 1930s and the 1960s is not to
claim, as previous scholars have, that some supported secular modernity and others did not. The
conflict, instead, was between two opposing forms of secularism, built around two opposing
ways to imagine the private/public split and two opposing visions of the family. This sounds
highly abstract, but it turns out that one of these forms of secularism legitimated collaboration
with fascists, and the other became a tool for resistance.
This analysis suggests one way to move beyond the critique of secularism. In place of defetishizing critiques of secularism, I suggest reframing our analysis around the highly diverse
ways in which religious communities themselves navigate the secular—sometimes in
emancipatory ways, and sometimes in repressive ones.
Carlo Invernezzi Accetti, “Beyond Secularism and Establishment: The Idea of Religious
‘Inspiration’ in Politics in the Intellectual Tradition of Christian Democracy”
The question of the relation between politics and religion is at the center of many debates in
contemporary political theory and science. Yet, these debates mostly take place within the terms
of a rather narrow set of categories, pitting “secularism” on one hand and religious
“establishment” on the other (and, more recently, “post-secularism” somewhere in between).
This paper proposes to expand the set of categories for discussing the issue by returning to an
intellectual tradition that has received little attention in contemporary debates on politics and
religion, despite its manifest historical importance in informing the constitutional frameworks of
many European and Latin American countries: the ideology of Christian Democracy. The
argument advanced is that in the work of several highly influential thinkers writing from within
this tradition in the middle part of the 20th century – such as Luigi Sturzo, Jacques Maritain and
Ernst-Wolfgang Bockenforde – is developed a distinctive model of Church-State relations, based
on the idea of religious “inspiration” of politics, which cuts across the more familiar distinction
between “secularism” and religious “establishment”. As well as reconstructing the characteristic
features of this model, and showing its key role in informing the legal and institutional
frameworks of several European and Latin American countries, the paper also assesses it from a
normative point of view by relating it to some of the central questions in the contemporary
political theory debates on the relationship between politics and religion.
SECOND PANEL BIOGRAPHIES
Udi Greenberg is an associate professor of European history at Dartmouth College. His first
book, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War
(Princeton, 2014), was awarded the Council for European Studies’ prize for best book in the field
2014-2015. He is currently working on a book-length project that explores the transformation of
Catholic-Protestant relations in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, from animosity to
cooperation.
James Chappel is the Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. He
received his PhD from Columbia University in 2012, and spent a year at the University of
Chicago Society of Fellows before moving to Duke. His first book, forthcoming from Harvard
University Press in 2018, is entitled Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Secularism and the
Remaking of Europe, 1918-1968. It is a transnational, trans-war history of the European Catholic
Church, asking how Catholics came to accept the secular condition of human rights and religious
freedom. His work on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Europe has been published
in Modern Intellectual History, New German Critique, Rethinking History, and Contemporary
European History. He is at work on a second project that investigates the imagination and
governance of aging in postwar Europe.
Carlo Invernizzi Accetti is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the City College of the City
University of New York and Research Associate at the Center for European Studies of the Institut
d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). His book entitled Relativism and Religion. Why
Democratic Societies Do Not Need Moral Absolutes was published by Columbia University Press
in 2015. He is currently working on a second book entitled What is Christian Democracy? The
Forgotten Ideology, under review at Cambridge University Press.