Secularity without Secularism:
The Best Political Position for
Contemporary Jews
David Novak
N
o group has benefited more from modern secularity than have the Jews.
Modern secularity has enabled Jews to become full and equal participants in
the secular societies in which almost all Jews now live. In pre-modern, presecular societies, Jews were at best tolerated and at worst they were persecuted as foreigners. Nevertheless, when these beneficiaries of modern secularity are told that they
must affirm secularism as the ideological foundation of the secularity from which they
have so benefited, then the cultural integrity of the Jews, especially but not exclusively,
is seriously threatened.
We need to define at the outset what is meant by “secularity” and then what is meant
by “culture.”
“Secularity” can be taken in two distinct senses. First, secularity is the modus operandi of
a society that does not look to any particular religious tradition for the validation of its
political authority in matters pertaining to the bodies and the property of its members,
that is, matters dealt with by criminal and civil law. So, for example, that is why even
though a majority of the citizens of the United States are Christians, and Christianity
looks to the Bible to authorize all its practices, one cannot invoke biblical authority as a
reason for public acceptance of any authorized practice in the United States. The authority of the Bible is only cogent for the members of a particular religious community who
accept their tradition’s normative interpretation of the Bible. In theory and in fact, this
has meant that even different groups that call themselves “Christian” do not accept
each other’s biblically based normative teaching. As such, suggestions of “Christian
David Novak holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies as Professor
of the Study of Religion and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is
the author of thirteen books, most recently The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political
Theology (2005) and Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian (2005).
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America” break down on the question: Whose Christianity—Catholic or Protestant—and
if the latter, which Protestant Christianity? Even if one were to speak of “Judeo-Christian
America” and assume that the biblical foundation of that society was the Old Testament
(whose authority is accepted by both Jews and Christians), Jews would hardly accept as
authoritative Christian biblical interpretation, any more than Christians would accept
Jewish biblical interpretation on any significant normative issue.
Instead of looking to any one religious tradition, or even to a combination of several
religious traditions, a secular society looks for a moral consensus among its members
in order to validate its political authority and its public policies. At least in the United
States and Canada, however, the majority of the members of the secular civil society
come from singular religious traditions, and it is in tandem with these traditions that
they bring their morality.1 As such, most of these religious people are only willing to
give their moral allegiance to a secular society whose public policies are consistent with
the morality that has already come with their respective religious traditions. But if, on
the contrary, any of these religious people makes the secular society their ultimate moral
arbiter, they have thereby relegated their own religious tradition and its morality to a
marginal role, one that is at odds with the primacy faithful adherents of that tradition
have always attributed to it and its morality. Therefore, there is nothing irrational about
a member of a traditional religious community affirming a public policy because this
is what his or her tradition teaches, as long as he or she can also give the reason his or
her tradition advocates that public policy. Inevitably, that reason has to be because this
policy is for the good of any human society and not just for the members of his or her
traditional community.2 Therefore, when a true moral consensus is reached in this kind
of secular society, this consensus is not based on merely accidental historical overlappings between traditions. Rather, this consensus is rational, based on what these respective traditions hold to be basic moral norms that apply to all human persons because
they are rationally evident, not because of the authority of any religious tradition itself.
Traditional authority, by contrast, is rooted in a historical revelation and, as such, it
can only claim those who are part of the community constituted by this revelation, and
who have accepted, preserved, and transmitted that revelation to posterity. Any society
that can respect the prior religious commitments of its members—commitments that
actually enable them to live in a secular society in good faith—is a society of “moderate
secularity.” Moderate secularity has largely obtained dominance, until quite recently, in
the English-speaking West, namely Britain, the United States, and Canada.
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1
I say “singular” rather than “particular” inasmuch as all the religious traditions adhered to by citizens of
a democratic polity would resist being taken as “parts” of some larger worldly genus called “religion.”
2
Logically speaking: the first “because” here denotes a “source” of a norm; the second, the end or purpose
of a norm. For the argument that religious people can present both the source and the end of any of their
stands on public morality, see David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998) 16–26.
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The second sense of secularity is what I would call “radical secularity.” Unlike moderate
secularity, radical secularity looks to “secularism” for its primary justification. This kind
of secularism found its first and most powerful expression in the French Revolution. At
present, it is being vigorously promoted by certain “secularists,” especially in the United
States and Canada, and by some of the leading proponents of the European Union. In
this kind of secularity, a secular society does not look to any particular religious tradition
for its political validation. In fact, it does not even look
to any moral consensus among the religious traditions
Any society that can respect the
from which the majority of its members come. Instead,
prior religious commitments
this kind of secularity regards the members of the society as having no religio-moral background at all, or it
of its members—commitments
requires them to leave their cultural background outside
that actually enable them to
society’s door, so to speak, before gaining entrance to the
process of public policy making. That is the case even
live in a secular society in
in matters pertaining to marriage, family relations, and
good faith—is a society of
sexuality, areas in which historic traditions have a very
heavy investment. The only area of human interaction
“moderate secularity.”
that is seemingly left out of the range of secular public
policy making is the area of religious ritual. Usually this
exclusion is subsumed under what has come to be called “the right to privacy.” Yet it
is hard to see how something like religious ritual, being the public practice of specific
communities, can be justified as a form of privacy. For radical secularity, the prior
religious commitments of its members, which are so very public, are a threat to the
ultimate hegemony that the secular society, and especially the secular state with all its
political power, claims for itself. Such societies are atheistic de facto (as is the case in
France) or atheistic de jure (as was the case in the former Soviet Union).
This latter view of secularity justifies itself in terms of individual autonomy, which
means that human individuals are free to create themselves, as it were. Secular society
entitles them—that is, grants them the right—to project whatever ends or goods they
choose for themselves as their raison d’être, as long as they do not infringe upon the
rights of others to do likewise. However, even advocates of this type of secularity cannot equate human self-creation with the uniquely divine attribute of creatio ex nihilo.
Unlike God, they still have to create themselves out of something already there, which
means that their “self-creation” is really self-development. What this most often means
is that the very goods individual members of society are “allowed” or “entitled” to
choose turn out to be only those goods that the elites (those who have political or economic power in that society) provide, over which these elites have varying degrees of
social control. As such, in this kind of secularity, the secular polity can accept no prior
source of right; it cannot recognize any authority outside itself to make any valid public
claims upon any of its citizens. At most, claims like those made by traditional religions
upon their own members are only valid when they are consistent with the claims made
upon citizens by the secular society itself. It is assumed all members of a secular society
have ceded all prior rights to that society as the price of admission to it. And, for those
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who have long ago abandoned a Hobbesian view of the ceding of prior rights being an
essential component of the total move from a state of nature to civil society, no such
prior rights ever existed at all.
The first and foremost of these prior rights are what could be called “cultural rights.”
In Western democracies like the United States and Canada, the most basic of these
cultural rights is the freedom of religion. Distinct from radically secular societies, in
moderately secular societies freedom of religion is not an entitlement from society; it
is a prior right that society is to respect, even honor—the only proviso being that the
exercise of freedom of religion not violate the common good (as, for example, when the
exercise of one’s religion endangers public safety). Since the way culture is dealt with
denotes a major difference between a radically secular society and a moderately secular
one, we now need to define what is meant by “culture.”
In its deepest sense, “culture” means a way of life adhered to by a particular, historically continuous community. As an all-encompassing way of life, culture permeates the
lives of the members of the historical community who bear it. The bearers of culture
are a people. The people inevitably regard their raison d’être to be the maintenance and
enhancement of their culture throughout history. Culture is not the invention of the
people who bear it; it is their inheritance from the past. Even though the people have
ample opportunity to change and develop many of the specific aspects of their culture
in the course of transmitting it from the past through the present into the future, the
people cannot change it beyond recognition from what it has generally been in the past,
nor can they see it as having been superceded by some other culture. Moreover, cultures that recognize that they are not synonymous with humanity per se look to some
particular historical event for their origin in the past. That particular event is inevitably
a theophany, a revelation of God that calls a singular community into existence for an
indefinite period of time, what in biblical terms is an “everlasting covenant” (Isaiah
55:3). That revelation is the transcendent warrant for the existence of the community
founded upon it. Culture, then, seems to be identical with “religion.”3 Indeed, the
Latin word cultura is closely related to the word cultus, both stemming from the verb
colere, “to cultivate.” Both religion and culture are cultivated as living things by those
who bear them, and in a deeper sense these people, both collectively and as individuals,
are cultivated by their religious cultures. Accordingly, one might say that a culture is the
outer form of its religion and that a religion is the inner intentionality of its culture.
I know of no historical culture or tradition that does not have a revelation as its foundation, and I know of no democracy that claims to have been founded by a revelation
from God. A democracy seems to be secular by definition. At most, a democracy can
3
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The only reason I use “culture” rather than “religion” is to avoid the modern mistake of separating culture
from religion by making culture a matter of nostalgia and something which, unlike religion, makes no
moral demands upon those who bear the cultural memory within a secular society.
S ecularit y without secularism / novak
affirm that God is supreme, implying the humanly created state is not. That seems to
be the minimal reason for the mention of God at the beginning of the Declaration
of Independence of the United States and the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Responsibilities.
Under the influence of radical secularity, many have a tendency to confuse culture
with art, even though art in its original sense of “making” (as in the Greek poiesis, from
which our word “poetry” comes) was developed as a cultural activity designed to inspire
the members of a culture to re-experience the founding events
of the culture in their transcendent dimension. Separated from
A democracy seems to be
culture, though, art becomes entertainment. When art retains its
secular by definition.
inspirational role, there is nothing disturbing about the presence
of non-cultural art to anyone who is not a “puritan.” But when
culture is reduced to art as entertainment, art so understood becomes a substitute for
culture in its transcendent sense. Religious people cannot accept the reduction of their
very public culture to the privacy of an “art form.” When reduced to entertaining art,
culture can be relegated by a radically secular society to the realm of private taste.
Secularist political claims are inevitably the claims made by those interest groups having
economic and political power in a society. These interest groups see themselves as having a mandate to create culture, understood to be the way of life the society is dedicated
to promoting—what incorporates the social energies usually involved in traditional
religions and their moralities. Moreover, these interest groups often explicitly reject the
notion that secular society derives its culture from earlier social engagements. Instead,
they now require older cultures to either derive their moral authority from the secular
polity or to totally obliterate themselves (as in a melting pot) into the new secular culture
that these interest groups are continually creating and promoting.
The emergence of radical secularity just before, during, and just after the French
Revolution coincides with the political emancipation of Jews in the West. For Jews,
1789 (generally speaking) marks the abrupt end of the Middle Ages and the equally
abrupt hurl into modernity. This meant that Jews gained the rights of all other individual citizens. But they thereby lost the collective rights they had when Jewish communities (qehillot) enjoyed a large degree of independence, when Jewish communities
had considerable collective power in ordering the religious, familial, and even the economic lives of their members. All of this was obtained within a larger Christian polity
(imperium in imperio), but one where Jews were related to the larger Christian polity
as members of a community having a contracted communal status therein, rather than
individual Jews having a direct relation to the sovereign (be it monarchial or republican)
as did the Christian citizens of the polity.
There were, to be sure, segments of the Jewish community who resented this elimination of what they took to be more ancient privilege than ancient discrimination. Many
rabbis, especially, knew that the end of their ancien régime meant the loss of their
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political power to enforce Jewish religious tradition among people who had no civil
recourse elsewhere. Nevertheless, despite their opposition, there was very little these traditionalist rabbis and their diminishing circle of committed followers could do to stem
a historical-political reality that promised Europeans (and, later, North Americans) a
freer, more intellectually open, and more prosperous life, and which seemed to be succeeding in delivering on that promise. The vast majority of Western Jews have seen the
new secular political order to be a marked improvement over the time when, simultaneous with external political control by gentiles, rabbis could internally direct almost
all Jewish social and intellectual efforts in the direction of traditional Jewish religion,
which the rabbis alone were allowed to interpret and apply. The response of Jews in the
West to this nouveau régime has been threefold.
First, there have been Jews who have followed the Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza,
in taking this new secular political order to be their new theological-political reality,
sufficient enough to make their separate Jewish existence not only redundant but a
positive detriment to their becoming fully part of the newly created culture of secular
modernity.4 These have been the assimilationists of various
The most enthusiastic Jewish
stripes. For them the chief attraction of this new culture
has been its minimal dogmatic requirements, unlike those
proponents of radical secularity
requirements of the Christianity of the ancien régime.
have known that the political
The most enthusiastic Jewish proponents of radical
secularity have known that the political revolution that
their rights as equal citizens
brought them their rights as equal citizens could not have
come about without a cultural revolution. That revolucould not have come about
tion occurred in the late eighteenth century, when the
without a cultural revolution.
still mostly Christian people of Western Europe (and their
cousins in still politically and culturally primitive North
America) in effect renounced the claim of their religion to be the transcendent warrant of the state’s political authority and their acceptance of it. That being the case,
how could Jews—who had much more to gain than the already politically dominant
Christians—do anything less if they wanted to be citizens of the new secular nationstates in good faith?
revolution that brought them
Second, there have been Jews who have not wanted total assimilation but who have
believed that they could survive culturally and religiously by becoming a special interest
group voluntarily functioning within a secular society with a warrant from the governing polity. By looking to the secular polity for their warrant, they have thereby ceded
any real moral authority of the Jewish community. These liberal Jews have endorsed just
4
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See Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chapter 3; also, David Novak, The Election of Israel (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995) 26–49.
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about any moral position being promoted by the powerful political-cultural-intellectual
elites in their society in the name of “progress.” This approach could be taken, whether
explicitly stated by its liberal proponents or not, as being conducted in return for the
“tolerance” of their particular religious practices by these powerful elites. This approach
makes itself manifest, especially today, when liberal Jews suggest that the “spirit” of the
Jewish tradition endorses such practices as abortion and same-sex marriage—practices
that are explicitly proscribed by the “letter” of the Jewish tradition.5 The willingness of
more and more liberal rabbis to almost celebrate abortions and to officiate at same-sex
weddings indicates that the religious exclusivity formerly claimed even by liberal Jews
has been elided by their concessions to secularist morality.
Third, there have been traditionalist Jews, mostly known by the Jewish neologism
“Orthodox,” who have attempted to keep as much distance as possible from the secularist culture and morality around them. Yet they too have accepted more of secularist ideology than many of them might realize. Like the liberals—whom they usually suspect, if
not detest—they look to the secular polity for political entitlements. Just as the liberals
look to the secularists for entitlements in order to be like them, so many Orthodox Jews
look to these same secularists for an entitlement to be different from them. In other
words, instead of challenging secularist morality in principle, these Jews (and Christian
sectarians like them) are content to simply claim their “peculiar” religio-moral practices
not be interfered with by the polity for the sake of something as elusive as “cultural
diversity.” Instead of arguing that something like same-sex marriage is contrary to the
rational-moral consensus of the various traditions that most of the citizens of society
come from, these sectarians simply ask to be exempt from what is being promoted as
public morality (that is, the right of everyone who wants to be married to be married).
How long the secularists who seem to be gaining more and more power in the United
States and Canada will “tolerate” such moral “diversity”—especially when it is being
practiced by people otherwise quite involved in the society and its intellectual culture—
is already being doubted by some of the more politically perceptive Orthodox Jews.
Therefore, the task of traditionalist Jews who see themselves as being real participants in
secular society is to work out a public philosophy that can fully affirm political, legal,
and even intellectual secularity without succumbing to either the fervent affirmation of
the program of secularism or to the cautious begging for dispensational tolerance from
secularist elites. I for one am convinced that such a quest can find within the sources of
the Jewish tradition authentic building blocks for the construction of a Jewish public
philosophy adequate to the challenge of modern secularity, but which can avoid pitfalls
offered to Jews by Jewish assimilationists, accomodationists, or sectarians.
5
In Jewish tradition, abortion is only allowable as a dispensation from a prohibition in cases where the
fetus is a direct threat to the life of its mother. See David Novak, Law and Theology in Judaism, vol. 1
(New York: KTAV, 1974) 114–24.
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Such a Jewish public philosophy that affirms the value of secularity, without succumbing to secularism in its various guises, requires a society that sees itself to be multicultural rather than being dominated by a single culture or denying culture altogether. An
example of such a society is Canada, even though its intellectual elites are now, for the
most part, rigidly secularist.
Canada was founded as a unique polity in 1867 by the union of predominantly EnglishProtestant Upper Canada (now Ontario) and predominantly French-Catholic Lower
Canada (now Quebec). This union, formulated in the Articles of Confederation, did
not require any people to give up its cultural identity and attendant morality (that was
only required of the Aboriginal peoples, an injustice whose effects Canada is still experiencing). There was recognition of enough common morality between the two founding
traditions to establish a secular polity, one that looked to this consensus for its moral
warrant. Since that moral consensus is hardly limited to Protestants and Catholics
alone, it could easily be joined by groups who, for the most part, came to Canada after
1867—such as the Jews.
Canadian consensus is secular insofar as it does not look to any singular religious event
for its warrant, like the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai for Jews or the Resurrection
for Christians. Yet it is not secularist since it does not presume to create a new morality for its participants, let alone claim to create a new culture for them. The consensus
is secular without being secularist because it only deals with what is penultimate in
human existence: the maintenance of a just social order. It does not offer salvation of
any kind, whether in this world or the next. For that reason, faithful Jews—and members of other historic faiths—can affirm the value of this society in good faith and be
loyal to its political institutions, especially its laws. People of faith do not have to check
their cultural baggage at the door of civil society before being granted admission. They
can thus practice much of their religious culture in public without worrying that a
larger secular domain will swallow them up. That, indeed, is true pluralism. The faithful
can also practice much of their morality in concert with members of other historic faith
communities whose basic morality looks very much like their own.6 That is why the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Responsibilities can begin with an affirmation of “the
supremacy of God and the rule of law,” two terms that can be taken in apposition. It
means, maximally, that a majority of Canadians can recognize a divine lawgiver standing behind the moral norms they hold in common, and that this does not require the
affirmation of any particular revelatory event. In other words, one can locate a consensus on what many would call “natural law.”
6
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The gradual inclusion of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs into this moral consensus belies the charge that it
represents a “Judeo-Christian” cabal trying to impose the Bible on a secular society.
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To date, however, too much of Canadian-Jewish political advocacy has been ethnic
advocacy, rather than an affirmation of true multiculturalism. This is probably due to
Canadian-Jewish memories from the not-so-distant past of anti-Semitism coming from
both the Anglo-Protestant and Franco-Catholic communities. Nonetheless, Canadian
Jews can only affirm a multicultural secularity with others. And they can do this more
honestly and effectively with Christians when they realize that there is no official antiSemitism being promoted by either the Catholic or Protestant churches in Canada
(or elsewhere in the world). What is now needed is a theoretical perspective that can
make the pursuit of multicultural secularity, to which anti-religious secularism stands
in opposition, an intelligent public policy position of the Jews of Canada (and in other
democratic societies). This true multiculturalism needs to protect itself and be protected from its enemies on the right—those who reduce culture to race and thus deny
multiculturalism by proposing a policy of ethnicity for its own sake, the inevitable
conclusion of which is racism. And this true multiculturalism needs similar protection
from its enemies on the left, who attempt to replace culture with ideology.
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