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WHAT IS “POSTSECULAR” ABOUT GLOBAL POLITICAL DISCOURSE?

T hough one hears much of the “postsecular” within academic circles today (see Gorski et al. 2012; Habermas 2010; Jacobsen and Jacobsen 2008; Rosatti and Stoeckl 2012; de Vries and Sullivan 2006), it is not always clear what this term means. For like other “post” terms, the word “postsecular” is purposefully ambiguous; it refers to whatever comes after the “secular” without specifying exactly what this new thing will be. This ambiguity grows further still when we recognize the many ways in which the idea of the “secular” has been used; Taylor (2007), for one, highlights three significant usages, while Somerville (1998) cites six and Philpott (2009) mentions nine. How, then, can we think meaningfully about what comes after the secular when we are not even sure what the secular entails? This way of putting the issue is somewhat deceptive, as the meaning of secularity was, until recently, more or less fixed. As Casanova (1994) explains, the theory of secularization has historically advanced three basic theses about the role of religion in modern society: (1) the differentiation thesis, which claims that religion is removed from its social-foundational role and forced to become just one sphere of endeavor among others (alongside politics, economics, science, etc.); (2) the decline-of-religion thesis, which argues that religion will gradually decline and disappear; and (3) the privatization thesis, which suggests that religion will be increasingly relegated to the private sphere (Casanova 1994, 19–20). Casanova (1994, 17) notes that this three-pronged theory of secularization “may be the only theory which was able to attain a truly paradigmatic status within the modern social sciences.” Thus, from this angle we can see that the term “postsecular” aims to describe the problematic that emerges once scholars begin to see that secularization theory fails to make sense of the role that religion is actually playing in the modern world. The purpose of this article is to help readers get a better overall sense of this postsecular problematic, and I will do so by considering seven prominent scholarly approaches thereto, each of which can be characterized by a basic statement or claim: