“Once there was no secular.”
So began theologian John Milbank’s tome Theology and Social Theory. The book earned Milbank a place in Time Magazine’s Top 100 “young people to watch” list. I remember when a friend told me that he had been part of a reading group who read the book in draft form, written out longhand on legal paper.
Milbank himself has proven a most voracious advocate of “postliberalism” in the United Kingdom. One can trace his influence in Philip Blond’s “red Toryism” in the early 2010s and more recently, in Adrian Pabst’s “blue Labour.”
Milbank developed the described the historical characteristics of “the secular” in other essays. He is, of course, correct. “Secular” is not “natural.” As many others have also documented, “the secular” arose within Western liberal societies. Charles Taylor published A Secular Age in 2007 with a nod to post-secularism, but within the liberal North Atlantic order. Today’s multipolar world has moved aggressively toward postliberalism, even if the Northern Atlantic liberal elite attempt to sustain their control over the world through political coercion and military threats and actions. It has become very hard to justify the liberal support for the warfare in Gaza and subversion of attempts towards a non-violent response to liberalism’s encroachment upon the borders of Russia. I won’t mention the growth of the BRICS.
We can now dismiss earlier “theories of secularization” that saw “the secular” as the end of an inevitable historical process. We can also dismiss earlier arguments about “American exceptionalism” and “secularization.” Earlier “conservative” liberals, especially the evangelical intelligentsia, argued that American liberalism allowed “space” for “religion” to sustain itself in the United States — in contrast to processes of secularization in Europe. The secret was in the “naked public square” — a square that has proven neither naked nor public.
The rise of the “Nones” as the largest self-reporting religious group in the United States has falsified this argument for American liberal exceptionalism. Mark Chaves of Duke Divinity School has shown that the United States is undergoing the same secularization process as Western European countries, just at a slower process. Christians liberalism, either in its conservative or progressive Protestant forms, results in the demise of congregations over generations and the erosion of the institutional strength of the church, especially in its Protestant forms.
I drove with my wife through a mid-sized Californian town two weeks ago. One could see the old mainline Protestant congregational buildings transformed into community churches and not-for-profit agencies.
Sherman A. Jackson speaks into this complex linguistic and social liberal flux with The Islamic Secular. He notes that Islamic regions and countries never developed the concept of “the secular” as it has in the West. The “secular” is not natural or inevitable but itself is a post-Christian phenomenon. From the perspective of the mosque, “the secular” represents Western colonialism.
Jackson seeks to re-map the term onto Islam. The goal is not to secularize (in the Western sense) Islam. Jackson sustains above all else faithfulness to Islam. Instead he names a region indigenous to Islam itself as “the Islamic secular.”
Northern Atlantic cultures tend to think secularism “as the ideological-cum-practical commitment to establishing and preserving the primacy of the secular over the religious by placing authority over public affairs entirely in human hands, with minimal if any pertinent recognition of God” (p. 29). Islamic thought and practice has responded defensively to such colonial categorizations. Islam has tended to accept this Western use as a zero-sum game: “either secular or religious” (p. 30) — and then placed all Islam as revealed in a totalizing concept and practice of Islamic law, shari’ah.
As a result Western use of the term has forced all Muslims into a bifurcated option: will they live secular lives and leave Islam or Muslim lives and leave Western society to its own woes? For Jackson, “there is nothing necessarily unavoidable (or innocent) about the presumption of a zero-sum dichotomy between the secular and the religious” (p. 30).
Christians should agree.
Jackson delves into the Islamic tradition to question this “zero-sum game.” The Western use of "the secular” gives “a false choice between the secular and the religious in their conceptualizations, practice, and articulations of Islam” (p. 30). Sociological statistics of liberal societies show that the church too often has presented “the secular” as a zero-sum game — and lost adherents over the generations.
Jackson describes the process that the liberal production of “the secular” involves for the faithful. “Pursuing secular interests in this new stage increasingly implied a conscious obliviousness to, if not a turning away from, religion. Conversely, remaining or becoming religious implied an attitude of conscious resistance to or devaluation of the secular. As certain ideas and activities come to be seen as belonging more distinctly to one or the other domain, it became increasingly difficult to engage with the secular and remain religious” (p. 32). “Religious” institutions represent a lifeboat amid the raging seas of secularism.
Protestants especially have experienced this pattern. Grandparents found “lifeboats” in sectarian movements which isolated them from the “world.” Parents then would strive to stand within both worlds — finding a home in the lifeboat and in the liberal society. Back and forth they have had to move. The skills and social practices of the lifeboats often propel this generation to success on the “high seas” of society. This presents the grandchildren with a choice: “lifeboat” or the “high seas.” Inevitably the high seas win. It becomes cramped in the non-liberal lifeboat, even if it gave the grandchildren their underlying success.
Liberalism is, after all, parasitic on non-liberal social formations.
The process ultimately has resulted in the rise of the “Nones.” Liberalizing parents left no real affiliation for their children. Life in the sea maintains one as autonomous, stripped of institutional or family. Voluntary social relations supersede involuntary ones. “Faith” or “spirituality” becomes entirely privatized — as required by liberal regimes.
“Secular” or “religious” . . . . and “secular” doesn’t interfere with long national weekends for the socially ascendant or commitments to congregations that once nurtured one’s life.
One cannot life forever on a lifeboat, even if it is preferable to the Titanic.
Jackson’s “basic aim is not to promote the use of ‘secular’ as a lexical item but to infuse it, as an already immoveable constituent of the modern lexicon, with alternative meanings, uses, and implications” (p. 42). He defines two levels of the “secular”: a macro-use and a micro-use. The macro-use “remains the dominant understanding of ‘secular’ today” (p. 38). It presents the zero-sum game: secular or religious. Liberal economy/state or God’s Revelation/Mosque (or church). "The secular” represents a spatial realm in which the Muslim must move into and then withdraw. Atheism ultimately results.
Abandon the lifeboats.
The micro-secular works differently, according to Jackson. The Western “micro-secular” asserts the validity of the “lifeboat.” It “does restrict the authority or relevance of what God says to a deliberately circumscribed realm of human activity, again, without challenging the existence of God. This restriction marks the boundary between the Western ‘religious’; and the Western ‘secular,’ or ‘non-religious: the two constitute two distinct and mutually exclusive realms (p. 39). One must climb back into the lifeboat after invigorating (or exhausting) adventures in the sea. One receives therapeutic recharging in the lifeboat so that one can jump back in the sea for the majority of the following week.
In and out. Lifeboat and the sea. Welcome to American Protestant evangelicalism.
No lifeboat exists within Islam, according to Jackson. Analogous, however, to liberal societies, Jackson finds two realms within Islam. One never moves outside Islam, however. No lifeboat and sea exist. Islam presents only one life to live. Nonetheless it “consists of not one but two distinct yet mutually reinforcing registers of religiosity, one shar’i, or religious, in the proper, the religious, sense, the other non-shari, in effect a religious secular. . . . Islam maps two distinct registers of religiosity onto the panoply of life” (p. 374).
One can name Jackson’s concept of the “Islamic secular” as “postliberal.” He bears no illusion of Muslims, however, of taking control of the liberal state. Islam does not force an “Islamic secular” upon non-Muslims. He does not advocate an inverse colonialism where Islam, not the liberal state, names the controlling power. He does not seek a “Machiavellian moment” to usurp liberal governance. Islam remains a single garment.”
We will have to explore how Jackson theorizes Islam’s interaction with the liberal state next week. Surprises await.
In the meantime, remember:
“Once there was no secular.”