I am going to address the question “What is Secularism?” in a somewhat roundabout way. I will begin from two familiar ways of understanding this notion, then will discuss the new angle on secularism elaborated by Charles Taylor and then in the end will place this new notion on a more familiar terrain, reconstructing its connection with what we somehow already accept as true of the modern condition. I’m going to talk about the meaning of secularism where it first developed and where it flourishes most: in the modernized societies and polities of the Western emisphere. This choice responds not to the conviction that what goes on elsewhere is less important – indeed in many ways the future of democracy, peace and respect for human rights will depend on what goes on in parts of the world other than the West – but rather to the conviction that the cause of promoting a dialogue among civilizations, as opposed to an unfortunate clash of civilizations, is better served first and foremost by the effort to understand what happens in one’s own turf, at one’s own end, so to speak, than by trying to speculate on what is or is not, or worse should or should not, be going on in other parts of the world.

So a first meaning of secularism refers to the fact that the exercise of legitimate state power – what we might call the coercive dimension of law – takes place in secular terms, the fact that all citizens can freely exercise their religious freedom and worship one God, another God or no God at all, and the fact that the Churches and the State are neatly separated. In the classical version of the separation between the State and the Church religious faiths are protected in their freedom to articulate revealed knowledge and paths to salvation, to administer the interpretation of what is holy, to regulate rituals, to infuse transcendence in daily life, to celebrate the bond shared by the faithful, as long as they never invoke support from the State’s coercive power, never pretend to turn sin into crime, and always allow their believers to change their mind and turn to another religion or no religion. It is secularism in this sense which is captured by the French term laicité, the Italian laicità, the Spanish laicidad and which in English must be somewhat tortuously translated as “religious neutrality” and is captured by the two clauses of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. We could call secularism in this first meaning “political secularism”.

A second meaning of secularism refers instead to social, rather than political, phenomena. In this second sense secularism concerns the fact that religious communities in modern societies cease influencing law, politics, education and public life in general and become functionally specialized sub-groups, just communities of like-minded believers, that people less and less frequently use religious rituals and symbols to mark significant moments of their lives, that religious boundaries of faith become of marginal importance in defining one’s social networks, that religious categories shape people’s thoughts, commitments and loyalties less and less frequently relative to other considerations, that religiously motivated action retreats into special areas of lesser and lesser importance for social life.

This distinction between political and social secularism is useful for a number of purposes. First, it allows us to pinpoint asymmetries and unbalances in complex processes of secularization. In some countries at a certain time, political secularization may proceed at a faster pace than societal secularization. Such is the case of Italy, where the secular character of State institutions has been defined a “supreme constitutional principle” by the Constitutional Court in 1989, yet the ongoing exhibition of religious symbols like the crucifix in State-owned buildings continues to be upheld by civil and administrative courts which evidently are more receptive to the pressure of a less secularized civil society, and the teaching of religion in public schools continues to be centered around one confession alone. Second, the distinction is useful because it allows us to see through a certain “ideology of secularization” that has dominated Western social and political thought for a while.

There is no doubt that religion has forcefully returned to the political scene within the new scenario that has emerged since 1989. Sociologists as Peter Berger, José Casanova and Adam Seligman have warned us about de-secularisation processes under way, about the “re-emergence” of a need for the sacred that has in fact never really vanished, about the increasing importance assumed by religious symbols and themes for a constantly growing number of individuals and groups. In the course of time, the idea that secularism in its first sense – the institutional separation of religion and politics and the bracketing away of controversial religious issues from the public arena – would inevitably result in a prevailing of secularism in the second sense, namely as the waning away of religion from the motivations, commitments and allegiances of more and more people turned out to be yet another philosophy of history driven by an ideological thrust. Empirical research in the sociology of religion reminds us that even the fact that people attend religious services less frequently does not mean that their lives are less shaped by religious ideas.

Taylor and the Faith Issue

The picture is not yet complete, however. I would like now to address a third notion of secularism, which has just been introduced two months ago by Charles Taylor in his monumental and path-breaking 900pp volume A Secular Age. The greatest advantage of Taylor’s approach lies in the “experience-near” or phenomenologicaly thick quality of his reformulation of the concept of secularism. Taylor characterizes secularism neither in terms of the questions “What do institutions look like in a secularized polity? What role does religion play in their perceived legitimacy?” nor in terms of questions such as “Has the importance of religion in the shaping of people’s intentions, commitments, loyalties, social networks diminished over time?” or “has the numbers of people who believe in God diminished?”, but rather in terms of a question asked entirely from within lived experience. The key questions for grasping this third meaning of secularism is “What does it feel to believe? What is it like to live as a believer or an unbeliever?”.

To sum up a long argument, secularism in this third sense “consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed unproblematic to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace” (3). From the perspective of secularism 2 the US may be a less secular society than France or Germany, but certainly is no less secular from this phenomenological point of view. Equally church attendance in the US may come close to mosque attendance in Pakistan or Jordan, but te experience of what it means to believe remains very different. From the standpoint of this third notion of secularism belief and non-belief, theism and atheism are not to be seen as rival theories, in cognitive terms, but rather as different ways of being in the world, of living one’s life.

Drawing on ideal types, we can picture these two ways of being in the world as follows. We all, believers and un-believers see our lives as possessing a certain moral shape, a non-random ordering of meanings, intentions, strivings. We all have a sense of certain conditions or type of activity in which we experience a fullness of being, an inner richness, a reconciliation for which I have used the term authenticity. And likewise we have a vocabulary for expressing the opposite experience: exile, distance, absence, melancholy, ennui, spleen. The difference lies in the fact that to live as a believer means to locate the source of that fullness or despair in the attainment of contact or alienation from a source external to the self, to which the self must open up. For unbelievers the power to reach fullness lies entirely within. There are many versions of this inner source of reconciliation and dignity: for some it resides in its law-giving capacity (Kant), for others in its unsurpassed capacity for facing up to a disenchanted, ie meaning-less world (Copernicus, Darwin, Freud), neither of which are my favorite vocabulary.

These are just two types of attitudes towards life. The world which has not yet been secularized is a place – according to Taylor’s notion of secularism – in which everybody, not just me, takes for granted that the source of value and meaning and fullness lies outside human reach in something transcendent. So the experience of believing gets transformed completely in the world we inhabit. It isn’t just a matter of whether a larger percentage of people believed in God in 1500 relative to the percentage of believers in 2000. What matters is that the subjective experience of believing has entirely changed. That experience has undergone a transformation from being the unquestioned framework shared by everybody in a natural, unreflective way, to the experience of being one among many options available, none of which can be sees as having a privileged status within society. The believer is condemned to see his own faith as one among several choices. He may continue to believe, but no longer in the unreflective and naïve way which characterized societies that are not secularized.

I won’t summarize the book. Taylor explores the cultural sources and processes that in the West facilitated the transition from an enchanted to a secular or disenchanted culture and the sources that enabled for the first time in human history the hegemony of a self-sufficient humanism, predicated on the “immanent frame”, namely a whole cultural horizon that identifies the best life with human flourishing, accepts no final goals beyond human flourishing and no allegiance or obligation to anything beyond this flourishing. There is some internal evolution in Charles Taylor’s position. Whereas in his essays entitled “Catholic modernity?” and “Religion today”, he denounced a “spiritual lobotomy” that, if assumed as exclusive, the immanent frame would impose on the Christian citizen, and pointed at the risk that such self-sufficient humanism of “shared political values” might appear to the believer as “a gratuitous exclusion of religion in the name of a rival metaphysical belief, and not simply as the protecting and controlling of the borders of a shared and independent public sphere”, Taylor now understands the immanent frame as playing a constitutive for secular modernity. Certainly it is just one view, but it has successfully reduced the religious experience to being just another point of view in a common space which then, by definition, must admit of a plurality of options.

It would be impossible to sum up the subleties of Taylor’s redefinition of secularism. I’ll just end with a remark metaphorically intended – as we say in Italian – as a stone thrown in the pond, that breaks the quiet and sends splashes and ripples all around. It seems to me that the experience of reflectiveness, of de-centering, of de-naturalization of belief that Taylor associates with the third meaning of secularism is ultimately not that removed from what John Rawls, the champion of a liberal view of politics, captures as the coming to terms with “the fact of pluralism”. The political order in which we in the West are immersed finds its cultural root in the fact that supporters of comprehensive views, religious and non religious alike, have learnt to see their understanding of what is human, of the value of life, of what is worth pursuing as one of many such understandings and that they relinquish the omnipotent fantasy that justice will come about only when all the rest of the human beings will be won to their views. And, most importantly, we enter the secular age in which we are immersed when all those who subscribe to comprehensive views learn to understand that the building of a political order based not on ultimate but on penultimate truths that all can share not as an adaptation to the sad reality of the ubiquitousness of human error but rather as a acknowledgment of and a tribute to human freedom which, under conditions of finiteness, produces plurality rather than uniformity.

Alessandro Ferrara teaches Political Philosophy at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, and is President of the Italian Society for Political Philosophy. His work looks into the sources and justifications of ‘normativity’ beyond the linguistic turning point. Departing from a critique on Habermasian proceduralism, over the years he has tried to develop an authenticity based view of validity and a judgment view of justice in political philosophy. He is author of Reflective Authenticity, Justice and Judgement and the forthcoming The force of the example.

This text was presented at the Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations round-table “What is Secularism?”, organised for the UNESCO World Philosophy Day held in Istanbul on 22 November 2007.