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WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY Johns Hopkins University

SOME THESES ON SECULARISM

I have long admired the work of Talal Asad. It is a real pleasure to explore the question of secularism with him. I also appreciate the work of Matt Scherer and Charles Hirschkind. I will condense a few themes under the heading Some Theses on Secularism, folding in responses to points raised by Scherer and Hirschkind as I proceed. If this presentation sounds a bit like a manifesto, well, perhaps it is. . . . My only excuse is that the issues are important and space is short.
ONE: SECULARISM AND THE SECULAR To me secularism is both a doctrine and a set of porous practices that embody and exceed it. It is, rst, challenged by some modes of thought that t into neither a secular nor a theocratic container; and it is, second, troubled by operational practices that stretch and break its key assumptions and categories. The version of secularism I focused on in the 1999 book was primarily the neo-Kantian, with work by J rgen Habermas on Postmetaphysical Thinking (1992) and John Rawls on u Political Liberalism (1993) providing the points from which that text proceeded. Both theorists adjusted their positions after that, but they were adamantly secular and sought to be postmetaphysical then. By postmetaphysical they meant, roughly, a world of politics in which controversial religious and existential orientations are bracketed from public discourse and political life. That kind of secularism negotiates the separation between public and private not by merely saying that there must be no ofcial state churchJefferson and
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 26, Issue 4, pp. 648656. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01117.x
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Tocqueville had both already said that. The neo-Kantians led by Rawls and Habermas added that the political justication of public goods, policies, rights, and identities must proceed without bringing contestable (or controversial) religious and metaphysical themes into public discourse. They thus translated multiple processes of osmosis back and forth between public and private zones into a xed line of separation between political discourse and religious life. In conning religion to private life, they not only missed much of what goes on in real public discourse but also obscured the profound importance of ritual, technique, micropolitics, and the cultivation of mores to the texture of public life. I join Talal Asad, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze in emphasizing how ritual and micropolitics do not simply represent beliefs or desires already there; they also educate the senses in specic ways; they accentuate some modes of conduct as they dampen others; and they help to compose embodied public virtues. It was a mistake to think that only communitarians were concerned with public virtue and that secularists, liberals, and individualists need not be. Some virtues such as presumptive generosity to other creeds and critical responsiveness to new movements in the politics of becoming, for instance, help to compose the texture of a robust pluralist culture. Micropolitics, expressed for instance in the interplay of gestures, words, music, images, rhythms, and story tokens on the media, embodies a very important modality through which privatepublic lines are crossed on a regular basis and pluralist virtues are cultivated, neutralized, or demeaned. During the 1960s and 1970s, most academic secularists in Euro-America assumed that the secular compromise imperfectly crafted over a few centuries in the former territories of Christendom would deepen and expand. That condence often expressed what William James (1996) called an intellectualist view of culture: It gives short shrift to the layered, embodied character of cultural life, to the role of spirituality among theists and nontheists alike in all aspects of life, and it promotes a contestable conception of secular time unconsciously indebted to Christian providentialism. (For the latter theme, see Connolly 2011.) By spirituality I mean the most basic disposition toward the fundamental terms of existence as such that an individual, leader, or constituency expresses. A spiritual orientation to mortality and the place of the human estate in the cosmos may be infused with existential gratitude, cynicism, hubris, or profound resentment of the most fundamental terms of human existence as such. Furthermore each of these modes may be attached to a theistic creed or to a nontheistic creed, so that the relation between creed and spirituality is one of attenuated connection, rather than simple identity. To adopt the latter view is also to soften the lines of distinction in

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secular, academic discourse between creed, philosophy, theology, doctrine, and the like, because each touches on themes explored in the others.
TWO: SECULAR SHALLOWNESS Neo-Kantian secularism (there are others) included (1) a focus on a shallow pluralism of public life, rather than negotiation of an ethos of deep pluralism embedded in private virtues and public life alike; (2) insufcient attention to the bumpy, creative politics of becoming (which exceeds a mere movement from the implicit to the explicit) by which new rights, identities, goods, and faiths periodically struggle to move from subsistence below the thresholds of legitimacy and justice onto those registers; (3) inattention to the critical importance of micropolitics in giving shape to established political alliances and dispositions and in contributing to the politics of becoming. Micropolitics consists of multimodal practices, deploying mixtures of image, rhythm, words, gesture, and touch to help code the visceral registers of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Micropolitics thus nds ample expression in churches, families, universities, corporations, unions, lm, the new media, and especially the resonances back and forth between all of these venues. It helps to code the visceral register of intersubjective life, and it is omnipresent in a media age. To ignore it is to ignore profound ways in which our predispositions to belief, desire, and action are primed and coded. THREE: THE EVANGELICAL SURPRISE In the late 1970s and early 1980s the formation of an evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine in the States took the devotees of liberalism and secularism by surprise. It did so in part because these latter constituencies had devalued the importance of micropolitics. It proceeded by crossing, cracking and challenging the operational divisions between private life and public culture sanctioned by secularism. Two decades of liberal neglect of the white working class and depreciation of the importance of spirituality to life also made a contribution to its emergence. The new complex deployed church, media, neighborhood, familial, and corporate forums to stoke and channel festering resentments. The devotees of this machine do not all share the same creed: Many neoliberals either deny a God or diminish its importance in their lives, while a specic conception of divinity is very important to the right edge of evangelism. Nonetheless, owing across these differences in creed are afnities of spirituality, in which the hubris of many in the rst constituency communicates with the existential resentment of many in the second. Eventually, each constituency helps to support and magnify the spiritual

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dispositions of the other, so that a new and potent resonance machine emerges. (See Connolly 2008.) The recent reemergence of modes of dogmatic atheism to challenge such a movement seems counterproductive to me, because these advocates too often recapitulate some of the modes of closure and dogmatism that need to be surmounted.
FOUR: MINORITIZATION Another set of forces that has helped to mobilize this reactive resonance machine is the intensication and acceleration of pressure to minoritize the world today. Many of these pressures are, ironically, grounded in the expansion and acceleration of neoliberal capitalism, the very econopolitical system loved by devotees of this machine. The pressures toward minoritization are promoted by the globalization of capital, the rapid expansion of the media, the acceleration of travel and mobility, the growth of global cosmopolitan centers, and the uneven distribution of regional wealth and security in a global economy. By the ugly word minoritization, as Matt Scherer sees, I mean the complex processes by which more minorities of multiple types become crystallized and more visible, including increased diversity within and between each of the domains of religion, ethnic afliation, age cohort, rst language, gender, household organization, and sexual afliation. Such minorities today must either become more visible, legitimate, and active in territorial statesas the old sense of a natural majority around which several minorities cluster becomes cracked and pluralized, or they will be thwarted by ugly means through the construction of territorial walls, ethnic cleansing, racial marking, media demonization of Islam, Vatican decrees, bombing campaigns, and so forth. FIVE: DEEP, MULTIDIMENSIONAL PLURALISM To respond to minoritization by crafting an ethos of deep, multidimensional pluralism requires that we both weaken the power of the evangelical-neoliberal machine and rewrite some of the understandings and aspirations of secularism. I dont know whether such a counterformation should be called a new variant of secularism or postsecularism. It may not be that important which label is chosen. But the issue is supremely important. Under a regime of deep, multidimensional pluralism, participants from multiple minorities bring aspects of their own existential creeds and ontopolitical stances with them into the public realm as this or that issue demands. They then recoil

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back relationally on those existential stances to acknowledge without profound resentment the legitimate contestability of this creed in the eyes of others. Such a double-entry pluralism is deep because it reaches into the spiritualities and creeds of participants, rather than trying to quarantine them. It is deep pluralism because it promotes self-recoil on the part of participants so that diverse constituencies can negotiate settlements out of mutual respect across multiple lines of difference. It contains a spiritual element because it solicits gratitude for existence as such from a variety of faith minorities, as it seeks to dampen those waves of hubris, existential resentment, and cynicism that can so easily plague a culture during a period of minoritization. Micropolitics is one key way to foster and amplify the needed spiritual afnities across differences in creed and other identications. Deep pluralism is an audacious ideal, but perhaps no more so than the more modest and restricted Tocquevillian pluralism was within Christianity during the early and middle parts of the 19th century. Moreover, it is not simply an ideal to embrace or deny. It is an urgently needed alternative to pursue if the pressures to minoritize the world are as active and entrenched as I claim. For a failure to deepen and extend the texture of pluralism today will mean the extension of a politics of demonization, restriction, and repression of diversity. The current drives to minoritization, by the way, dramatize retrospectively how an earlier period of Euro-American secularism half-consciously universalized a set of protestant, Christian themes about politics, dress, time, the will, the basis of morality, and the viable limits of diversity. One such sign emerges when we compare French opposition to Islamic scarves in the name of secular neutrality to the expressive character of Christian insignia, secular dress codes, regularized gestures, public vocabularies, strategies of justication, and styles of walking that had already ltered so densely into secular, public life that they did not appear as affronts to secular neutrality to most participants. I thus agree with Asad on this issue. (I turn to the question of the secular body shortly.) So, negotiation of deep, multidimensional pluralism is needed. Such an ethos of engagement would seek to maintain torsion between supporting diversities that have already found a place on the public register and participating periodically in the bumpy politics of becoming by which new movements jostle and disturb an established pattern of diversity as they seek a place on a modied register of legitimacy and justice. The demanding task is to embed such an ethos of engagement in churches, families, schools, consumption practices, media dramas, education, and state priorities. That is the very agenda that the evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine declares war against, through its tactics of moralism, Islamophobia,

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and support for rigged, deregulated markets. Luckily, not all members of that complex buy such a bill of goods all the way down. Equally pertinent, the leaders of this assemblage understand the dynamics of micropolitics much better than do liberals and secularists who focus primarily on the politics of public deliberation and argument, almost as if they could exist in a vacuum.
SIX: THE DILEMMA OF DEEP PLURALISM It is difcult, to say the least, to promote the virtues of deep pluralism while at the same time fending off aggressive, racial, national and religious unitarianisms and ghting against the econopolitics of neoliberalism loosely aligned with them. These two agendas of postsecular pluralismto promote diversity and to fend off the politics of unitarianismtrouble one another, even as they require each other. As you try to ward off resistance to deep pluralism it is all too easy to fall into the self-defeating trap of adopting some ugly tactics of the adversary. How to proceed, then? I am uncertain. But one pertinent thing is to publicize the real binds that propel many white working- and middle-class people into this antipluralist and antiegalitarian machine, even when it works against some of their own interests. Another is to emphasize the elements of contestability in your own ontotheological stance as you expose corollary dimensions of contestability in others. Such an invitational mode highlights the real diversity that is already latent in public life, as it challenges others to fold a double-entry approach of creedal articulation and recoil back on its contestability into their relational activities. The most difcult task, still, is to challenge modes of existential resentment, hubris, and demonization wherever they nd expression without replicating that mode as you proceed. Identication of positive exemplars helps here. I admire the diverse ways that William James, Gilles Deleuze, Talal Asad, Michel Foucault, and Catherine Keller struggle with this issue. Several play up the unavoidablity of existential suffering in the world, as they seek to transduct existential suffering into a positive spiritual orientation. Nietzsche called that combination the spiritualization of enmity, a postsecular relational virtue much in need today. The minimal agenda is to publicize the entrenchment of multiple processes that promote minoritization of the world, to embrace publicly a positive ethos of deep pluralism, to cultivate positive pluralist virtues, and to expose and resist violences, punishments, and abjectications designed to protect a ctive image of

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national unity under new conditions of being. Given the sense of tragic possibility in my image of being I cannot guarantee success on all these fronts. It is nonetheless pertinent to see how intercoded they are and to participate in efforts to move the culture in productive ways.
SEVEN: BELIEF, ROLE, AND SPIRITUAL INTERINVOLVEMENTS As the foregoing comments suggest, to me, faith, spirituality, belief, desire, and role performance are interinvolved, with none being entirely reducible to the others. (I do not accept the analyticsynthetic straitjacket adopted by some social scientists.) It is thus unwise to underplay, although too many secularists and intellectualists still do, how creative adjustments in role performance can open onto shifts in belief and political activity. It is such intersections that Charles Hirschkind points to, I think, when he poses the question of whether there is a secular body. My provisional answer is no, there is not. Some, for instance, who support secular doctrine may be infused with a spirituality of hubris, others with ressentiment, others with cynicism, others yet with existential gratitude, and many with complex mixtures of such an abstractly described set. So diverse modes of spiritual embodiment, both in individuals and constituencies, can fall under the umbrella of the same secular doctrine. I am not now ready to develop a bodily genealogy of such types, although I will read carefully anyone who does. My complementary projectto such a genealogyinvolves acting with others experimentally on those dicey intersections between role performance, spiritual disposition, belief, desire, and orientations to political action. Are you in the middle class? Switch to a hybrid or electric car and tell you friends, family, and neighbors why. Press your neighborhood association to allow solar panels, explaining why you think they are important. Bring a visitor, new issue, or dilemma to your church or mosque, showing how it impinges on local and global life simultaneously. Revise the course you teach to include the strange (and imperfect) pluralism in Spain before 1492. Start a blog with others that examines new events in the spirit of deep, multidimensional pluralism. Then check to see whether and how your beliefs, afnities with other constituencies, and orientations to political action have been touched and nudged by this modest set of role experimentations. Move back and forth between modifying role performance, noting a shift in desire, and acting in new ways politically. For, again, belief, role, desire, spirituality, and political action are interinvolved. So a shift in one may issue in vibrations that communicate with others. The right wing already does all this, in its own way.

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This issue may also point, in conjunction with the comments by Matt Scherer, to the role that conversion plays in politics. It was perhaps a minor conversion on my part to begin to negotiate a shift from the shallow pluralism of secularism to deep pluralism 20 years or so ago. But I did feel tremors of uncertainty and ennui when it was under way. And I did hear accusations of disloyalty from friends as that shift was gestating. I was initially accused, in nice ways, of selling out to a theocratic politics, because some friends could not identify any space between secularism and theocracy. Experimenting with such a course, however, may have helped me to visualize how, on ones good days, a nontheistic reverence for the most fundamental terms of human existence as such can slide between, as it were, monotheistic devotions of several types and an atheism that either denies spirituality or conveys a hubristic tone. That shift turned out to open productive exchanges with some participants in both camps. I was surprised and pleased about how many devotees of this or that version of monotheism, for instance, welcomed my confession (and profession) and encouraged exploratory exchanges between us. Now that such a minor conversion has been negotiated, up to a point, I pledge never to change my mind again. . . . ABSTRACT Secularism is both a doctrine and a set of practices that correspond to it and exceed it. The practices help to compose us. But most secularists overlook the role of the practices themselves, thereby supporting a shallow pluralism. This, in turn, left them unprepared, in the States, for the emergence of a new evangelical-neoliberal machine in the 1980s that has operated in both private and public domains. What is needed today is the formation of a deep, multidimensional pluralism that cuts through the old secular formations and supplants the new machine. It is difcult to forge such a new machine, but suffering will be severe if we fail because of the persistent pressures at work in late modernity to minoritize the world along several dimensions. Some ways to press in this direction are explored. [secularism, politics, pluralism]
NOTE
Acknowledgment. A version of this essay was rst published as an article in the online journal ABC Religion and Ethics on April 4, 2011.

REFERENCES CITED
Connolly, William E. 2008 Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2011 A World of Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Habermas, J rgen u 1992 Postmetaphysical Thinking. William H. Hohengarten, trans. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. James, William 1996 [1909] A Pluralistic Universe. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Rawls, John 1993 Political Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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