Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

“The Theological Aspirations of Secular Politics”

This is an interesting short review of a new book by Simon Critchley.  Here’s a paragraph which was particularly eye-catching (h/t Sam Bray):

The thinker who has done most to expose the theological aspirations of secular politics, and especially its infatuation with some version of providential design, is John Gray. Like Critchley, Gray thinks of modern politics as “a chapter in the history of religion”. What begins with the millenarian thinking of the Hebrew scriptures finds its expression in the bloody utopianism of the Jacobins, the Nazis and Stalin. Here, the book of Revelation is the surprising template for modern political action. “What is essential to neoliberal millenarian thinking is the consolidation of the idea of good through the identification of evil, where the Antichrist keeps assuming different masks: Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, Kim Jong-il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and so on,” Critchley writes. For Gray, the reason to expose the theological underpinnings of political discourse is to exorcise its power. Only tragic pessimism can free us from the violence of the theologian’s ambition. But there are no votes in tragic pessimism. So the bloodshed continues.

Posted on by

Duncan on Christian Libertarianism

Richard F. Duncan (U. of Neb. College of Law) has posted By the Waters of Babylon: Christian Libertarianism in the Age of Obama. The abstract follows.

In this short essay, I compare Secular America to ancient Babylon in order to convey my understanding of what it is like to live as a faithful Christian in a postmodern secular state. Just as the Jewish people wandered in exile in ancient Babylon, Christians wander today in an America that has rejected our God.

My pragmatic proposal for Christians living in the Age of Obama is to recognize that Babylonian law will typically reflect the morality and values of Babylon, not those of the America of our forefathers. The path to religious freedom in our society lies in an explosion of privatization, in a radical shrinking of the role of government in the lives of its citizens. As government retreats, religion will be free to advance. As government programs are cut and resources are returned to private citizens, we will be free to educate our children as we believe is best, to support causes we believe are right and good, to live our lives in accordance with our understanding of the good life and based upon our own theories of justice. In other words, a small Babylonian government should be the goal of Christians who find themselves living by the waters of Babylon here in Secular America.

Posted on by

Zucca, “A Secular Europe”

This year, the Oxford University Press will publish A Secular Europe (forthcoming May 2012) by Lorenzo Zucca (King’s College London).  The publisher’s description of the book follows.

How to accommodate diverse religious practices and laws within a secular framework is one of the most pressing and controversial problems facing contemporary European public order. In this provocative contribution to the subject, Lorenzo Zucca argues that traditional models of secularism, focusing on the relationship of state and church, are out-dated and that only by embracing a new picture of what secularism means can Europe move forward in the public reconciliation of its religious diversity.
Read more

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

We Could Have Told You That

On Saturday, Pope Benedict named 22 new cardinals, including Archbishop Timothy Dolan of the neighboring Catholic Archdiocese of New York, now Timothy Cardinal Dolan. While in Rome, Cardinal Dolan went out of his way to assure the Vatican that New York is not an entirely irreligious city:

“New York seems to have an innate interest and respect for religion and I’m going to bring that up because I don’t like that caricature that New York is some neo-Sodom and Gomorrah” he told reporters after celebrating Mass on Thursday in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica…. “[T]here are instances of secularism and materialism and paganism in New York as there are everywhere … but I have found the New York community to be very religious and innately respectful of religion, interested in religion,” he said.

Cleary, more Vaticanisti need to be reading CLR Forum.

Posted on by

Ringelheim on Rights, Religion & the Public Sphere in the European Court of Human Rights

Julie Ringelheim (U. of Louvain, Belgium) has posted Rights, Religion and the Public Sphere: The European Court of Human Rights in Search of a Theory?  The abstract follows.

This paper seeks to analyze the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) case-law on religious freedom in the light of political and social theory debates on the place of religion in the public sphere. The Court’s jurisprudence on these matters denotes an increasing attempt at going beyond casuistry and building a consistent vision of religious freedom and its implications for state-religions relations, valid across Europe. Alongside the core notion of pluralism, three major principles have progressively emerged in this case-law: the right to autonomy of religious communities vis-à-vis the state; an obligation of neutrality for the state; and the necessity of the secularity of the legal order’s foundations. These principles, it is submitted, are in line with the democratic ideal that underlies the European Convention. Yet, the Court’s approach to religion-related disputes is not without tensions and problems. These are especially manifest when the Court handles disputes that go beyond the issue of the respective autonomy of religion and public authority, and concern the multifaceted question of expression ofreligion in the public sphere, in particular, the status of religion in public discourse, the wearing of religious garments at public school or university, and claims for accommodation of religious practice in the workplace. In some cases of this sort, the Court has adopted stances that are questionable from the viewpoint of the principles it has itself identified as central for religious freedom. In other instances, these principles themselves appear to be in need of further elaboration. But the significance of the tensions surrounding the treatment of religious disputes by the Court cannot be fully grasped without having regard to present-day discussions in social and political theory on the relations between religion and the public sphere. From this perspective, it appears that the ECtHR’s case-law is to a large extent built on assumptions stemming from the classic secularisation thesis, and that this, among other factors, makes it theoretically ill-equipped to deal with situations that do not fit this paradigm.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Muslim Peer Calls for Christian Europe

Sayeeda Warsi sits in the House of Lords and serves as minister without portfolio in Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet. This week, she will lead a British delegation to meet with Pope Benedict at the Vatican. In advance of her meeting, she has written a piece in today’s Telegraph that is bound to get attention.

Baroness Warsi writes that secular Europe should be more comfortable with religion. In fact, she argues that Europe should recover its Christianity. When she meets the Pope, she writes:

I will be arguing for Europe to become more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity. The point is this: the societies we live in, the cultures we have created, the values we hold and the things we fight for all stem from centuries of discussion, dissent and belief in Christianity.

These values shine through our politics, our public life, our culture, our economics, our language and our architecture. And, as I will say today, you cannot and should not extract these Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you can or should erase the spires from our landscapes. . . .

Of course there is a crucial caveat to all of this. I am not calling for some kind of 21st century theocracy. Religious faith and its followers do not have the only answer. There will be times when politicians and faith leaders will disagree. What is more, secularism is not intrinsically damaging. My concern is when secularisation is pushed to an extreme, when it requires the complete removal of faith from the public sphere. So I am calling for a more open confidence in faith, where faith has a place at the table, though not an exclusive position.

What makes these sentiments somewhat surprising is that Baroness Warsi is a Muslim. In fact, she is the first Muslim woman to serve in a British cabinet. Her remarks are similar to those of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who last fall wrote nostalgically about his memories of growing up in the Christian Britain of the 1950s. At least for some members of minority faiths in Britain, it seems, a faith-based culture — even if the faith is not one’s own — is preferable to a militantly secular culture in which all faith is deprecated.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Secular Value of Supporting Churches

A very interesting perspective by John Gray here on the proposal for the creation of atheist temples (discussed here).  What struck me about the piece was its recommendation to atheists to support existing churches and religious structures exactly for some of the reasons that Botton describes.  The point might be expanded to apply more generally to secular support for religious institutions — not a reason from autonomy or separation or one of the other usual liberal reasons, but one more merits-oriented, as it were.  From the conclusion of Gray’s piece:

[Auguste] Comte wanted his new religion to be based on science, so the temples of humanity pointed only as far as science could reach. That is why his new church failed. The very idea of a science-based religion is an absurdity. The value of religion is that it points beyond anything that can be known by the methods of science, showing us that a mystery would remain even if everything could be finally explained. The heart of religion isn’t belief, but something more like what Keats described as negative capability: “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

Rather than trying to invent another religion surrogate, open-minded atheists should appreciate the genuine religions that exist already. London is full of sites – churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of worship – that are evocative of something beyond the human world. Better spend the money that is being raised for the new temple on religious buildings that are in disrepair than waste it on a monument to a defunct version of unbelief.

Posted on by

Schwartzman on Questioning the Special Treatment of Religion

Micah Schwartzman  (U. of Virginia School of Law) has posted What if Religion is not Special? The abstract follows.

This Article argues that leading accounts of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses fail to provide a coherent and morally attractive position on whether religion warrants special treatment as compared with secular ethical and moral doctrines. Focusing on two central issues involving whether laws must have a secular purpose and whether religious exemptions are constitutionally mandatory, this Article rejects existing theories as either theoretically inconsistent or substantively mistaken. If religion does not warrant special treatment, then it is important to ask what our attitude should be toward the Religion Clauses. Under originalist theories of constitutional interpretation, the Religion Clauses should be considered morally regrettable. Under non-originalist theories, there may be interpretations of the constitutional text that allow for the possibility of moral reconciliation. Either way, rejecting the idea that religion is special requires reassessing our understanding of the Religion Clauses.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

New Journal: “Secularism and Nonreligion”

Secularism and Nonreligion, “the world’s first journal dedicated to the investigation of secularism and nonreligion in all forms,” has commenced publication this month. The editors’ description of the new journal’s focus and scope follows:

Secularism and Nonreligion is an interdisciplinary journal published with the aim of advancing research on various aspects of ‘the secular.’ The journal is interested in contributions from primarily social scientific disciplines, including: psychology, sociology, political science, women’s studies, economics, geography, demography, anthropology, public health, and religious studies. Contributions from history, neuroscience, computer science, biology, philosophy, and medicine will also be considered. Articles published in the journal focus on the secular at one of three levels: the micro or individual level, the meso or institutional level, or the macro or national and international levels. Articles explore all aspects of what it means to be secular at any of the above levels, what the lives of nonreligious individuals are like, and the interactions between secularity and other aspects of the world. Articles also explore the ideology and philosophy of the secular or secularism.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Bloechl (ed.), “Christianity and Secular Reason”

Jeffrey Bloechl (Boston College) has edited a very interesting looking forthcoming collection of essays, Christianity and Secular Reason: Classical Themes and Modern Developments (Notre Dame Press 2012).  The publisher’s description follows.

What is secularity? Might it yield or define a distinctive form of reasoning? If so, would that form of reasoning belong essentially to our modern age, or would it instead have a considerably older lineage? And what might be the relation of that form of reasoning, whatever its lineage, to the Christian thinking that is often said to oppose it?

In the present volume, these and related questions are addressed by a distinguished group of scholars working primarily within the Roman Catholic theological tradition and from the perspectives of Continental philosophy. As a whole, the volume constitutes a conversation among thinkers who agree in their concerns but not necessarily their conclusions. Taken individually, each essay concentrates on a range of historical developments with close attention to their intellectual and sometimes pedagogical implications. Secular reason, they argue, is neither the antipode of Christian thought nor a stable and well-resolved component of it. Christian thinking may engage with secular reason as the site of profound difficulties, but on occasion will also learn from it as a source of new insight.