Religion and International Relations Theory

Contemporary international relations theory takes the Euro-American definition of religion and its separation from politics as the starting point for social scientific inquiry. I adopt a different starting point. Secularism refers to a series of political settlements that define, regulate, and manage religion in modern politics, including international politics. This chapter draws attention to the politics surrounding these settlements. It examines two trajectories of secularism, understood as sets of practices that embody what it means to be “secular” in particular times and places. The first is laicism, in which religion is portrayed as an impediment to modernization and development. The second is Christian or Judeo-Christian secularism, in which religion is portrayed as a source of unity and identity within cultures and civilizations, and conflict between them. In examining the history and politics of these forms of secularism, I develop four take-away points for scholars of international relations (IR):

• International relations theorists need to pay closer attention to how foundational cultural and normative categories such as the secular and the religious operate politically in international affairs. Varieties of secularism are not reducible to material power or resources but play a constitutive role in creating agents and in contributing to the international normative structures in which these agents interact.

• Varieties of secularism developed at the domestic and regional levels are influential at the global level. These secularisms reflect shared interests, identities, and understandings about religion and politics, and constitute part of the social and cultural foundation of international relations. They contribute to the construction of national and supranational interests and identities, serve as strategies for the management of religious diversity and religious pluralism, contribute to the creation of inclusionary and exclusionary group identities, and influence international conflict and cooperation.

• The social, historical, and philosophical particularities and contingencies of various forms of secularism suggest that realist, liberal, and constructivist theories of international relations, international law, and international order that consider religion to a private sphere need to be reevaluated.

• Until recently, a consensus has separated a Judeo-Christian-derived notion of the “sacred” from an allegedly universal “secular” reason. This consensus has defined the terms through which religion and politics are conceptualized in the field of international relations. Yet as other formulations of the sacred and secular make themselves heard, this consensus is showing signs of strain. How these strains are addressed is critical to world politics. Claims to universality grounded either in the claim to have overcome religio-cultural particularities altogether, as in laicism, or to have located the key to democratic moral and political order in a particular religio-cultural heritage, as in Judeo-Christian secularism, are problematic.

To develop these points I draw on the rich conceptual vocabularies of Charles Taylor, Jose Casanova, William Connolly, and Talal Asad, bringing their arguments to bear upon international politics. Taylor offered the original impetus for my approach to multiple secularisms in “Modes of Secularism,” which describes an “independent political ethic” variety of secularism and a “common ground” strategy of secularism that turn out to be “ancestral to rather different understandings of secularism today.”¹ Casanova also laid the groundwork for the multiple secularisms argument in referencing two paths for managing the public/private distinction: liberal and civic/republican. Like Taylor and myself, he is cautiously critical of both of these traditions, “the liberal perspective because it insists on the need to confine religion to a private sphere, fearing that public religions must necessarily threaten individual freedoms and secular differentiated structures; the civic-republican perspective because . . . like the liberal perspective it also conceives of public or civil religions in pre-modern terms as coextensive with the political or societal community.”² From an international relations standpoint, Casanova’s emphasis on three ethnocentric prejudices in Euro-American theories of secularization is particularly important. He cites a bias for Protestant subjective forms of religion, a bias for “liberal” conceptions of politics and the public sphere, and a bias for the sovereign nation-state as the systemic unit of analysis. Connolly also draws attention to the cultural particularities of modern varieties of secularism, observing that the secularism of Rawls and Habermas draws cultural sustenance from the “private faiths” of those who embody the European traditions from which Christian secularism emerged.³ Asad explores the construction of modern categories of the secular and the religious, unpacking the assumptions that govern Western forms of secularism including the specific concepts of religion, ethics, and politics that they presuppose.⁴

This chapter builds on these contributions to examine the history and politics of two secularist traditions that have been influential in international politics. Laicism is a discursive formation that attempts to distill a particular understanding of religion and ban it from politics. The secular spheres are emancipated and expanded, as Casanova argues, “at the expense of a much-diminished and confined religious sphere.”⁵ Judeo-Christian secularism is a matrix of discourse and practice that claims the secular as a unique Western achievement. These varieties of secularism are neither mutually exclusive, nor are they the only forms of secularism in existence. There is no strong or necessary dividing line between them; an individual or institution may draw on resources from both simultaneously. They are not free-floating discourses but are disciplined into individuals and collectivities. As a result, the study of secularism, like the study of nationalism, requires an examination of particular historical contexts and particular social and political practices. It is the study of how these discourses are deployed and with what effects.

These varieties of secularism are influential within and between countries that inherited, borrowed, had imposed upon them, or somehow ended up living with (or in tension with) the secular and religious traditions of historical Latin Christendom, including Europe and its settler colonies, Turkey, Iran, and India. Practitioners, theorists, and ordinary people inculturated into these forms of secularism rely upon, reproduce, and contest these organizing frames to make sense of events involving religion and politics, including international politics. Secularisms pre-structure discourse involving politics and religion, in the sense described by Hayden White.⁶ In the language of international relations theory, they are productive forms of power that work “through diffuse constitutive relations” to contribute to the “situated social capacities of actors.”⁷ They are vehicles through which shared interests and identities involving religion and politics that developed at the domestic, regional, and transnational levels become influential globally.

The argument carries a number of implications for international relations theory. First it marks a significant departure from the cognitivist “trap” criticized by Krasner and other critics of constructivism. As Krasner argues, “Norms, though not irrelevant, do not have the weight that constructivism has attributed to them.”⁸ I agree. Norms alone do not carry the weight often ascribed to them in constructivist analyses.⁹ Norms cannot be analyzed outside of the structures of power and embodied social practices in which they take shape and are expressed. This is the case not only for traditions of secularism but also for formations of nationalism, varieties of capitalism, and other powerful organizing principles and practices of modern collective life. My approach accommodates the “weightiness” of secular authority, expressed not only through beliefs but also habits of speech, sensibilities, practices, and ways of being in the world. Though perhaps a different way of dealing with the “inevitable lightness of norms” than Krasner envisioned, this approach opens possibilities for constructivist theorizing that accounts for the influence of norms without reducing them to individual thoughts and beliefs.

Second, charting the influence of different forms of secularism and their complex and co-constitutive relation with the category of religion poses a fundamental challenge to the clash of civilizations narrative in which religion is portrayed as a fixed source of communal identity that generates conflict in world politics. Tracing the history and politics of the categories of the secular and religious shows that to identify something as religion and assign to it a permanent and fixed role in politics is itself a political move. In my understanding of the social construction of secularism,¹⁰ elements of religion escape attempts to define and confine it to particular roles, spaces, or moments in politics. It is not possible to stabilize the category of religion and lock in its relationship to politics.

Third, most international relations scholarship operates on the assumption that secular nationalism and national identity have transcended religion and religious identity. My argument provides evidence to the contrary. Secularist traditions and the religious commitments that are refracted and rephrased through them are implicated in and even partially constitutive of national identity. Religion has contributed to the creation of what Peter van der Veer describes as “public spheres of political interaction central to the formation of national identities.”¹¹ Secularisms play a significant role in creating and contributing to inclusionary and exclusionary group identities, whereby certain religious actors are brought in as fit for political participation in politics while others are excluded. As such, secularisms may be observed to be cultural-national projects of normalizing various religions and particular religious actors as either fit or unfit to participate in politics.

Finally, a more nuanced account of the interplay between religion and politics presents an alternative to realist, liberal, and constructivist theories in which religion is simply considered a private affair. According to conventional accounts, religion was “privatized” in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia as a solution to sectarian violence in Europe. Yet this claim to delimit the terms and boundaries of modern politics by defining religion as its private counterpart is a politicized move that must be historically contextualized. Secularism is a form of authorized knowledge that creates and perpetuates particular claims about the limits of modern politics; claims which have become established settlements operating below the threshold of public international discourse. These settlements lie at the core of modern assumptions about and practices of state sovereignty.

The next section takes a brief look at the ancestral historical and philosophical context from which these forms of secularism emerged, as reflected in the writings of Immanuel Kant. This excursion, charting the debts owed by modern forms of secularism to Kantian philosophy and ultimately to Christian tradition, lays the groundwork for the subsequent discussion of Euro-American varieties of secularism and international politics.

Though well known in the field of international relations for his contributions to theories of cosmopolitanism and the democratic peace, Kant was also an important forerunner of modern forms of secularism.¹² In fact, the legacy of Kant’s rational religion may someday be judged to outweigh his other contributions. Kantian universal moral philosophy sought to address the adversarial effects of religious sectarianism in Europe. To do so, it laid a template for a generic form of Protestant Christianity that was intended to supersede sectarian faith. This template served as an important precursor of and resource for later articulations of secularism. To understand it is to catch a glimpse of the philosophical and religious context out of which modern European and American secularisms emerged. It is also to gain a sense of how historical, religious, and philosophical legacies continue to resonate in the modern politics of secularism.

To overcome sectarianism Kant proposed elevating universal philosophy, or rational religion, to the position previously reserved for Christian theology.¹³ Rational religion was a generic form of Christianity that would replace and render publicly inert sectarian faith. The key to Kantian rational religion is that it is anchored in a metaphysic of the supersensible that is presupposed by any agent of morality.¹⁴ As Connolly argues, “Kant anchors rational religion in the law of morality rather than anchoring morality in ecclesiastical faith.”¹⁵ This allows Kant to retain the command model of morality from Augustinian Christianity while shifting the proximate point of command from the Christian God to the individual moral subject.¹⁶ By shifting the point of command to the individual moral subject, however, Kant also ensures that “authoritative moral philosophy and rational religion are now only as secure as the source of morality upon which they draw”—individual apodictic recognition.¹⁷ In this way, Kant’s rational religion, although it seeks to displace Christian ecclesiastical theology, actually retains at least four traces of it:

First, it places singular conceptions of reason and command morality above question. Second, it sets up (Kantian) philosophy as the highest potential authority in adjudicating questions in these two domains and in guiding the people toward eventual enlightenment. Third, it defines the greatest danger to public morality as sectarianism within Christianity. Fourth, in the process of defrocking ecclesiastical theology and crowning philosophy as judge in the last instance, it also delegitimates a place for several non-Kantian, nontheistic perspectives in public life.¹⁸

Kant was a forerunner of secularism rather than a secularist himself.¹⁹ Yet the forms of secularism that evolved out of the Kantian settlement consisted of “a series of attempts to secure these four effects without open recourse to the Kantian metaphysic of the supersensible. Secularism, in its dominant Western forms, is this Kantian fourfold without [a] metaphysical portfolio.”²⁰

This Kantian influence is discernible in both forms of secularism discussed in this chapter. Laicism represents itself as an authoritative public morality based on a singular conception of reason. It rejects theology in public life as dangerous sectarianism and harbors an antipathy toward nontheistic and non-Kantian philosophies, as well as philosophies of public order derived from Islamic tradition. Laicism attempts to contain ecclesiastical intrusions into public life.²¹ Its overarching objective is to provide “an authoritative and self-sufficient public space equipped to regulate and limit ‘religious disputes in public life.”²² To achieve this “Kantian effect,” it constantly reinscribes the boundary between public and private, secular and religious, mundane and metaphysical; boundaries that are often legitimated through reference to the dictates of logic, science, reason, or nature.²³ Connolly has described this as “the secular variant of Christianity.”²⁴

In this secularized Christian moral order, which arguably has powerfully influenced certain dimensions of the modern international order, the spheres of social control are divided between the realm of the Judeo-Christian sacred, on the one hand, and the realm of secular morality, international law, and international order on the other. A consensus separating the Judeo-Christian sacred from universal secular and scientific reason defines the terms through which the sacred and the secular are conceptualized in international relations. The idea that a single logical, natural universal moral order is slowly replacing religion has been influential in Kantian-inspired theories of international relations; the work of David Held, Martha Nussbaum, and Francis Fukuyama all reflect this assumption.²⁵

Like laicism, Judeo-Christian secularism also aspires to serve as an authoritative public morality based on a singular conception of reason. It marginalizes nontheistic and non-Kantian philosophies, including Islamic ones, and seeks to regulate particular kinds of religious intrusions in public discourse. The difference is that whereas laicism claims to have superseded religion and religious origins, Judeo-Christian secularism elevates and expands upon a different aspect of Kant’s moral philosophy: his insistence that among all the available ecclesiastical creeds, Protestant Christianity comes closest to “universal rational religion.”²⁶ Judeo-Christian secularism positions itself more warmly toward the metaphysical portfolio rejected by laicism, drawing upon different elements of Kantian philosophy to sustain a distinctive narrative of modern secularism, in which Christianity, and later Judeo-Christianity (with all of the tensions inherent in that hyphen), is depicted as the moral foundation of modern Euro-American secular democracy. The Judeo-Christian origins of modern secularism are held up and valued in this story; claims to secular order are emboldened and not scuttled through reference to them. Unlike laicism, which considers secularism universal, or at least universalizable, Euro-American secularism is portrayed here as culturally embedded, fixed, and largely unproblematic.

One of the arguments this chapter makes is that both of these narratives pose distinct problems from the perspective of the pluralization of world politics. Claims to universality grounded either in the laicist claim to have overcome religio-cultural particularity altogether, or in the Judeo-Christian secularist claim to have located the key to secular, scientific, and/or moral order in a single religio-cultural heritage are both problematic because they privilege and normalize a particular European experience of religion and politics at the expense of other histories and traditions of negotiating relations between political and religious authority.

References to Christian secularism call attention to the complex relations between Christianity (and beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the moral tradition referred to as Judeo-Christianity) and secularism, a subject of heated debate among philosophers, theologians and historians.²⁷ Theologian John Milbank argues that “all the most important governing assumptions of [secular social] theory are bound up with the modification or the rejection of orthodox Christian positions. These fundamental intellectual shifts are . . . no more rationally ‘justifiable’ than the Christian positions themselves.”²⁸ Milbank concludes that only Christian theology offers a viable alternative to both secular reason and “nihilism.” Christian theologian Arend Theodor van Leeuwen, according to Mark Juergensmeyer, argued that “the idea of a secular basis for politics is not only culturally European but specifically Christian.”²⁹ For van Leeuwen, “secular culture was . . . Christianity’s gift to the world.”³⁰ While Juergensmeyer argues that van Leeuwen’s thesis about the Christian origins of modern secularism “is increasingly regarded as true, especially in Third World countries,” he criticizes it for implying that secularism was uniquely Christian, and argues that other civilizations do have distinctions between priestly and secular authority.³¹ Juergensmeyer does not suggest, as does van Leeuwen, that Christianity is the unique foundation of secular democracy. Instead, he is sympathetic toward the argument that particular forms of secularism are historically specific formations. Juergensmeyer therefore supports van Leeuwen’s argument, as do I, that “the particular form of secular society that has evolved in the modern West is a direct extension of its past, including its religious past, and is not some supracultural entity that came into being only after a radical juncture in history.”³²

In reaching these conclusions, however, Juergensmeyer wrestles with and ultimately leaves unresolved a tension in the study of secularism that motivates my own work. On the one hand, he acknowledges the complex yet much-interrupted relation between Christian history and doctrine and modern Christian, Judeo-Christian, and post-Christian secularisms. On the other hand, unlike van Leeuwen, he wants to leave open the possibility that alternative forms of secularism can and have emerged in non-Christian settings. Yet in the same moment that Juergensmeyer gestures toward the need to disaggregate secularism and examine its historical trajectories and variable relations to religion, he describes religion and secular nationalism as opposing “ideologies of order” and concludes that, “there can ultimately be no convergence between religious and secular political ideologies.”³³ I disagree. Rather than closing down inquiry by positing the religious and the secular as mutually exclusive ideologies of order, we need to take a closer look at how particular trajectories of secularism have been constructed in relation to religion and what this has meant for international politics.

In The Secular City, Harvey Cox writes that “it will do no good to cling to our religions and metaphysical versions of Christianity in the hope that one day religion or metaphysics will once again be back. They are disappearing forever and that means we can now let go and immerse ourselves in the new world of the secular city.”³⁴ Hardt and Negri’s Empire describes the evanescent quality of religion, suggesting that “every metaphysical tradition is now completely worn out.”³⁵ This view is also influential in the academy, where, as Esposito observes, “religious faith was at best supposed to be a private matter. The degree of one’s intellectual sophistication and objectivity in academia was often equated with a secular liberalism and relativism that seemed antithetical to religion. . . . Neither development theory nor international relations considered religion a significant variable for political analysis.”³⁶ In this view, “the mixing of religion and politics is regarded as necessarily abnormal (departing from the norm), irrational, dangerous and extremist.”³⁷

Laicism is a powerful tradition of the secular city, world “empire,” and Western academy that presumes that metaphysical traditions have been exhausted and transcended. It is one of the founding principles of modern political thought and one of the pillars of the modern separation of church and state. There are many manifestations of laicism, including the exclusion of religion from the spheres of power and authority in modern societies (structural differentiation), the privatization of religion, and decline in church membership and individual religious belief. Laicism is a powerful organizing principle of state politics influential in France, the former Soviet Union, Turkey, and China. Derived from the Jacobin tradition of laïcisme, it is described by Partha Chatterjee as “a coercive process in which the legal powers of the state, the disciplinary powers of family and school, and the persuasive powers of government and media have been used to produce the secular citizen who agrees to keep religion in the private domain.”³⁸ Laicism, like other forms of secularism, is a form of discipline.

Others have described this tradition. Casanova suggests that the privatization of religion is “mandated ideologically by liberal categories of thought which permeate not only political ideologies and constitutional theories but the entire structure of modern Western thought.”³⁹ According to Taylor, the overarching objective of the “independent political ethic” mode of secularism, similar to laicism and pursued by Grotius and others, is to identify features of the human condition that allow the deduction of exceptionless norms about peace and political obedience, making religion irrelevant to politics.⁴⁰ As Grotius famously argued, “etsi Deus non daretur . . . even if God didn’t exist, these norms would be binding on us.”⁴¹ The result is that “the state upholds no religion, pursues no religious goals, and religiously defined goods have no place in the catalogue of ends it promotes.”⁴² Van der Veer and Lehmann observe that “it is a fundamental assumption of the discourse of modernity that religion in modern societies loses its social creativity and is forced to choose between a sterile conservation of its premodern characteristics and a self-effacing assimilation to the secularized world.”⁴³ Richard King describes laicism as the attempt to define and then exclude (whatever laicists identify as) religion:

The Enlightenment preoccupation with defining the “essence” of phenomena such as “religion” or “mysticism” serves precisely to exclude such phenomena from the realms of politics, law and science, etc.—that is, from the spheres of power and authority in modern Western societies. Privatized religion becomes both clearly defined and securely contained by excluding it from the public realm of politics.⁴⁴

International relations theory operates on the assumption that religion was excluded from spheres of power and authority in modern societies in the course of creating the modern state. Realist and liberal approaches reflect the assumption that religion has been confined to the private sphere or has diminished altogether.⁴⁵ As Katzenstein observes, “Because they are expressions of rationalist thought deeply antithetical to religion, the silence of realist and liberal theories of international relations on the role of religion in European and world politics is thus not surprising.”⁴⁶ Thomas refers to the assumption that religion has been privatized as “the Westphalian presumption.”⁴⁷ It is now increasingly clear that a more complicated story is waiting to be told.

Most of the literature on religion, the Protestant Reformation, and the Westphalian settlement (which ended the Thirty Years’ War of 1618 to 1648) describes the decline of religion in European public life. Skinner observes that after Luther, “the idea of the Pope and Emperor as parallel and universal powers disappears, and the independent jurisdictions of the sacerdotium are handed over to the secular authorities.”⁴⁸ Pizzorno refers to this transition as the “Gregorian moment,” describing it as the most emblematic episode of what he calls “absolute politics” in Western history, which “lies at the root of the transfer, as it were, of the collective responsibility for ultimate ends from a collectivity having the boundaries of Christianity, and including all believers tied by this particular bond of faith, to separate collectivities defined by the territorial boundaries of one state and including all the individuals identified by their living within those boundaries.”⁴⁹ Philpott emphasizes in this volume the significance of the Protestant Reformation and processes of secularization that emerged from it to challenge the temporal powers and decrease the public role of the church, while contributing to the emergence of a proto-sovereign states system.⁵⁰ Krasner has suggested that “the idea of sovereignty was used to legitimate the right of the sovereign to collect taxes, and thereby strengthen the position of the state, and to deny such right to the church, and thereby weaken the position of the papacy.”⁵¹ He concludes that Westphalia “delegitimized the already waning transnational role of the Catholic Church and validated the idea that international relations should be driven by balance-of-power considerations rather than the ideals of Christendom.”⁵² Finally, Cavanaugh argues that the conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inverted the dominance of ecclesiastical over civil authorities through the creation of the modern state, preparing the way for the eventual elimination of the church from the public sphere.⁵³

Westphalian republicanism was organized around a modern conception of social and political order in which individual subjects assemble a society under a single sovereign authority. By challenging the arbitrary rights of kings in the name of the common good,⁵⁴ the new republicanism did delegitimize and transform preexisting hierarchic forms of order, as most conventional accounts have it. Yet the new republicanism also reinforced a particular kind of distinction between natural and supernatural order that came out of, and remained indebted to, a broader Christian framework.⁵⁵ Early republican order was characterized by a strong idea of providence and a pervasive sense that men were enacting a master plan that was providentially preordained. Taylor has suggested that the idea of moral order underlying this arrangement would in fact be unrecognizable to non-Westerners due to its emphasis on a providential plan to be realized by humans.⁵⁶ That early republicanism was situated within this broader Christian context fits with Krasner’s observation, also noted by Shah and Philpott in chapter 2 of this book, that in the Treaty of Osnabrück (one of two treaties that made up the Peace of Westphalia along with the Treaty of Munster), religious toleration was limited to Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics.⁵⁷ Westphalia, as Nexon concludes, contributed to a “territorialization of religion” leading toward the “formation of polities in which territory, state, and confession were closely linked.”⁵⁸

The set of strategies and practices for managing religion and politics that I am referring to as “laicism” emerged gradually and fitfully, and not without rivals, out of this Christian-influenced Westphalian moral and political order. Although laicism presents itself as a universalizable discourse that emerged from the Westphalian settlement as a solution to the wars of religion, Connolly’s description of it as “a specific fashioning of spiritual life . . . carved out of Christendom” comes much closer to the mark.⁵⁹ Joshua Mitchell takes this argument a step further, observing that even “the idea of the sovereign self, the autonomous consenting self, emerged out of Christianity . . . [and] paying attention to the religious roots of consent in the West alert[s] us to the fact, that it is in fact a provincial development, not necessarily universalizable.”⁶⁰ From the perspective of international relations, it is clear that the influence of Christianity upon the original Westphalian “secular” settlement makes it difficult to subsume modern international order into realist and liberal frameworks that operate on the assumption that religion has been privatized. The traditions of secularism that form the subject of this chapter contribute to the constitution of particular forms of state sovereignty that purport to be universal in part by defining the limits of state-centered politics with “religion” on the outside.

Modernization theory, the policy expression of the commitment to build a modern Westphalian state, exemplifies the power of these laicist commitments. It is characterized by the assumption that “managing the public realm is a science which is essentially universal and that religion, to the extent it is opposed to the Baconian world-image of science, is an open or potential threat to any polity.”⁶¹ As Falk argues, the exclusion of religion from the spheres of power and authority “was intended to facilitate governmental efficiency as well as to provide the basis for a unified politics of the state in the face of religious pluralism, and a background of devastating sectarian warfare. Ostensibly, in the modern world religious identity was declared irrelevant to the rational enterprise of administering the political life of society.”⁶² In viewing religion as an impediment to the scientific management of the domestic and international public realms, modernization theory reflects laicist assumptions. Modern state builders were to confine religion to the private realm to ensure the proper demarcation of public and private, religious and secular. This paradigm was considered to be universal, or at least universalizable. As T. N. Madan wrote in one of the earliest and most influential articles on the subject, “The idea of secularism, a gift of Christianity, has been built into Western social theories’ paradigms of modernization, and since these paradigms are believed to have universal applicability, the elements, which converged historically—that is in a unique manner—to constitute modern life in Europe in the sixteenth and the following three centuries, have come to be presented as the requirements of modernization elsewhere.”⁶³

Laicist assumptions sit quietly beneath the surface of structuralist and materialist approaches to international relations that approach religion as epiphenomenal to more fundamental material interests. Neorealism assumes that states have fixed and innate interests and that state behavior is constrained by international structure defined by factors such as the distribution of power, technology, and geography. Historical materialism, following Marx, dismisses religion as “a mode of consciousness which is other than consciousness of reality, external to the relations of production, producing no knowledge, but expressing at once the anguish of the oppressed and a spurious consolation.”⁶⁴ These materialist approaches to state interests neglect the constitutive and productive role of social norms and embodied practices. Secularism cannot be reduced to material power or resources, but plays a constitutive role in creating agents and contributing to the normative structures in which they interact. Even constructivists have paid little attention to the politics of secularism. Focusing on the interaction of preexisting state units to explain how international norms influence state interests, identity, and behavior,⁶⁵ the literature on the social construction of the state system has ignored the secular and religious, or treated religion as private by prior assumption.⁶⁶

The most significant implication for international relations of these differing attempts to expel religion from politics or treat it as privatized is that they demand “not only the sharing of the (independent political) ethic but also of its foundation—in this case, one supposedly independent of religion.”⁶⁷ Laicism defines religion by designating that which is not religious, or the secular.⁶⁸ In doing so, it demarcates the legitimate limits of politics. Laicist settlements are a form of politics that, as Pizzorno argues with reference to absolute politics, “set[s] the boundaries between itself and other activities. To define what is within or without the scope of politics, one needs laws, or abolition of laws, hence political decisions, political activities, and discourse.”⁶⁹ My point is that setting the terms for what constitutes legitimate politics and legitimate religion is a culturally and historically variable determination. As David Scott argues, “part of the problem to be sketched and investigated therefore has precisely to do with the instability of what gets identified and counted by authorized knowledges as ‘religion’: how, by whom, and under what conditions of power. In other words, the determining conditions and effects of what gets categorized as ‘religion’ are historically and culturally variable.”⁷⁰

European and American secularisms are forms of discipline that emerged out of Latin Christendom. They rely upon and reproduce particular definitions and assumptions about the secular and the religious. These traditions are not universal and they are constantly shifting. Consider, as an illustration of the fluidity of these categories, the derivation of the English term “religion” from the Latin religio.⁷¹ In the pre-Christian era Cicero provided an etymology of the term linking it to the Latin verb relegere: to “retrace” or “reread.”⁷² In pre-Christian times religio referred to retracing the ritual of one’s ancestors. As King observes, “This understanding of the term seems to have gained provenance in the ‘pagan’ Roman empire and made religio virtually synonymous with traditio.” The Roman idea of religio tolerated a variety of different traditions, since the exclusion of one tradition in order for another to be practiced was not required.⁷³ Early Christians were referred to as atheists because they did not belong to a recognizable traditio and did not acknowledge the gods of others.⁷⁴ Yet as Christians increased their power among the Romans, they transformed the meaning of religio by severing its association with ancestral traditions:

It became increasingly important within early Christian discourses to drive a wedge between the traditional association of religio with traditio. This occurred through a transformation of the notion of religio. Thus in the third century CE we find the Christian writer Lactantius explicitly rejecting Cicero’s etymology, arguing instead that religio derives from re-ligare, meaning to bind together or link.⁷⁵

So as Christianity became more powerful, religio came to be associated with “a worship of the true and a superstition of the false.”⁷⁶ For Christians, and many Westerners in general, religion came to denote a bond of piety between one true God and man. Cavanaugh dates this modern concept of religion to the late fifteenth century and the writings of Marsilio Ficino, whose 1474 De Christiana Religione represents religion as a universal human impulse. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “religion moves from a virtue to a set of propositions . . . at the same time [as] the plural ‘religions’ arises, an impossibility under the medieval usage.”⁷⁷

The reformulation of religio by European theorists offers a set of clues to understanding religion and contemporary international politics because it established “the monotheistic exclusivism of Christianity as the normative paradigm for understanding what a religion is.”⁷⁸ The reification of the category of religion by European political theorists as only referring to (Christian) belief or a set of propositions influenced European social order, European colonial projects, and relations with other civilizations, as well as, later, European forms of secularism. In the 1790s Kant, for example, could not fathom the idea of more than one valid religion:

Differences in religion: an odd expression! Just as if one spoke of different moralities. No doubt there can be different kinds of historical faiths, though these do not pertain to religion, but only to the history of the means used to promote it, and these are the province of learned investigation; the same holds of different religious books (Zendavest, the Vedas, Koran, and so on). But there is only a single religion, valid for all men in all times. Those [faiths and books] can thus be nothing more than the accidental vehicles of religion and can only thereby be different in different times and places.⁷⁹

Writing in the same decade, Joseph Endelin de Joinville, the surveyor general in the administration of Frederic North, first governor of British possessions in Ceylon, affirmed that “religion” could refer only to a Christian belief system:

An uncreated world, and mortal souls, are ideas to be held only in an infant state of society, and as society advances such ideas must vanish. A fortiori, they cannot be established in opposition to a religion already prevailing in a country, the fundamental articles of which are the creation of the world, and the immortality of the soul. Ideas in opposition to all religion cannot gain ground, at least cannot make head, when there is already an established faith.⁸⁰

Crucially, and for reasons having to do with the problems associated with the management of religious pluralism within Europe, European political theorists emphasized the idea of religion as a set of beliefs rather than the more embodied Ciceronian understanding of religio and traditio.⁸¹ As King concludes, “Modern discussions of the meaning and denotation of the term religio tend to follow Lactantius’s etymology, thereby constructing a Christianized model of religion that strongly emphasized theistic belief (whether mono-, poly-, heno-, or pantheistic in nature), exclusivity, and a fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendent world of the divine to which one ‘binds’ (religare) oneself.”⁸²

The forms of secularism discussed here inherited a definition of religion that is indebted in specific ways to the European experience of managing religious diversity in a Christian-majority Europe. In modern, religiously diverse societies, attempts to manage the terms through which this received understanding of religion is defined (and then confined) lead to conflict between laicists, policing the boundary of what they define as the public sphere, and their rivals, who view this policing as an extension of religion in the name of an alternative (laicist) set of metaphysical assumptions.⁸³ As Taylor explains:

What to one side is a more strict and consistent application of the principles of neutrality is seen by the other side as partisanship. What this other side sees as legitimate public expressions of religious belonging will often be castigated by the first as the exaltation of some peoples’ beliefs over others. This problem is compounded when society diversifies to contain substantial numbers of non-Judaeo-Christian religions. If even some Christians find the “post-Christian” independent ethic partisan, how much harder will Muslims find it to swallow it.⁸⁴

In holding fast to a particular definition of religion and then excluding it from politics, laicism defines both politics and religion in a particular fashion. Laicism marks out the domain of the secular and associates it with public authority, common sense, rational argument, justice, tolerance, and the public interest.⁸⁵ It identifies the religious as that which it is not, and associates religion with a personal God and beliefs about that God.⁸⁶ Laicism, then, is not simply the absence of religious or theological discourse. It is more complex than a clean laicism-religion oppositional binary would suggest, enacting a particular kind of theological discourse in its own right. It “theologizes” the religions that it oversees, by which I mean it discourses and reasons theologically, or speculates in theology.⁸⁷

Connolly writes that for many secularists, religion is “treated as a universal term, as if ‘it’ could always be distilled from a variety of cultures in a variety of times rather than representing a specific fashioning of spiritual life engendered by the secular public space carved out of Christendom.”⁸⁸ Milbank, arguing from within a Christian ontology, refers to the “critical non-avoidability of the theological and metaphysical,” and observes that differing approximations of this appear in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Gillian Rose, Rene Girard, Guy Lardreau, and Christian Jambet.⁸⁹ Stephen White argues from his weak ontological position that “the supposedly neutral, ‘freestanding’ nonontological standpoint is, in fact, a perspective constitutively infused with an ontological desire to hold an authoritative center in the flux of political life . . . the desire for a definitive center is what needs to be diffused.”⁹⁰ From different positions, these thinkers concur that although laicism purports to stand outside and above the contested territory of religion and politics, it does not. It is located on a spectrum of theological politics.

In its strongest formulations, laicism leads to the normalization of various religions and religious actors as either fit or unfit for participation in democratic politics. As Taylor observes with regard to global politics, “Defined and pursued out of the context of Western unbelief, [laicism] understandably comes across as the imposition of one metaphysical view over others, and an alien one at that.”⁹¹ In legislating the terms through which the secular and the religious are defined and experienced, laicism rules out particular kinds of linkages between religion (as laicism defines it) and spheres of power and authority such as law, science, and politics within states. In defining the limits of state-centered politics with religion on the outside, it serves as a template for the management of religious pluralism within states and the conduct of state sovereignty between them.

In defining the starting point in relation to which the religious is constructed, laicism contributes to the production of the categories that it presupposes. It is most powerful when this process remains invisible or unseen, representing itself as the natural order that emerges when there is no ideology present.⁹² Laicism presents itself as public, neutral, and value-free, while religion, religious actors, and religious institutions are posited as private, affective, and value-laden. Religion is denominated as the domain of the violent, the irrational, and the undemocratic. Thus Cavanaugh argues that, “liberal theorists . . . assume that public faith has a dangerous tendency to violence,”⁹³ and Appleby refers to the “conventional wisdom that religious fervor—unrestrained religious commitment—inevitably expresses itself in violence and intolerance.”⁹⁴ Laicism is the “conventional wisdom” adopted by Cavanaugh’s liberal theorists. The secular public sphere is construed as the domain of reason, objectivity, deliberation, and justice, and the religious private sphere the domain of subjectivity, transcendence, effeminacy, and affect. Laicism guards against (what it defines as) religion in the public sphere; religious presence is seen as unnatural, infectious, undemocratic, and theocratic.⁹⁵ To adapt Bonnie Honig’s insight about virtue theorists, laicists “distance themselves from the remainders of their politics and that distance enables them to adopt a not terribly democratic intolerance and derision for the other to whom their democratic institutions are supposed to be (indeed claim to be) reaching out.”⁹⁶ These religious subjects, as Roxanne Euben has shown, become repositories for laicist anxieties about relations between politics, religion, and violence.⁹⁷

Judeo-Christian secularism developed in the mid-twentieth century, primarily though not exclusively in the United States, and is distinguished by the partial displacement of the dominant narrative of Protestant hegemony and the representation of certain moral and political values as held in common by Christianity and Judaism and connected to particular Western traditions of law and governance. While laicism seeks to confine religion to the private sphere, this second invented secularist tradition connects contemporary Euro-American secular formations to an historical legacy of Western Christian and (beginning in the mid-twentieth century and then only selectively) Judeo-Christian values, cultural and religious beliefs, historical practices, legal traditions, governing institutions, and forms of identification. The common claim of Judeo-Christian secularism of all varieties, and the key to understanding it as a form of authority, is that Western political order is grounded in a set of core values originating in Judeo-Christian traditions that cannot (or should not) be diluted or denied.

Let me be clear. In referring to Judeo-Christian tradition, I do not mean to suggest that there is agreement between or within Jewish or Christian traditions about what this term means, or even whether it should be used at all. There isn’t. Rather, of interest to me is that the term has become a signifier of a particular and extraordinarily powerful argument: that there is such a thing as a “Judeo-Christian” religious and moral tradition, and that it serves as the fount and foundation of modern political values such as liberty, equality, and secularism. Many individuals are socialized or disciplined into this worldview and rely upon it implicitly to organize the world through the lens provided by its assumptions. The narrative of Judeo-Christian secularism, which tells a story that connects a broad and diverse set of religious traditions to Western models of secular governance, has been particularly influential in the American political imagination. In attempting to come to terms with the cultural and political significance of this variety of secularism, I am not suggesting that Judeo-Christian values actually form the basis of Western institutions or styles of governance such as secular democracy, but rather that the conviction among adherents to this narrative that these moral values ground Western practices of secular democracy is in itself powerful enough to warrant critical scrutiny. I am not suggesting that the concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition is or is not a valid one; this is not for me to decide.⁹⁸ I am suggesting that a specific kind of civic republican tradition emphasizing the connections between moral values allegedly held in common by Judaism and Christianity (the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments, etc.) and particular styles and traditions of governance including but not limited to liberty, equality, and the separation of church and state has become quite powerful and therefore merits scholarly attention. This tradition is real because it is imagined; I am not asserting that it is imagined because it is real. To make the latter kind of claim, as President Obama once remarked in reference to the question of when life begins, would be above my pay grade.

An example of this narrative is the religious populism of Richard John Neuhaus.⁹⁹ He argues that universally valid traditional Catholic moral arguments should replace secular public godlessness as the basis of American identity, community, and foreign policy. Americans in his view are a Christian people, and Catholic natural law should serve as a universal moral-religious foundation for American public life.¹⁰⁰ Drawing on the arguments of John Courtney Murray, Neuhaus argues that Catholicism is not the enemy of liberalism but “its true source and indispensable foundation.”¹⁰¹ For Neuhaus and others who represent different variations of this tradition, religion (understood as Catholicism, Christianity, and/or Judeo-Christianity, depending upon whom you ask) is the elemental defining feature and moral basis of Western civilization. Ted Jelen has described this position with reference to Peter Berger’s concept of a sacred canopy: “In the United States, a ‘Judeo-Christian’ tradition is thought to provide a moral basis for political life—what some analysts have described as a ‘sacred canopy’ beneath which political affairs can be conducted. Religion is thought to perform a ‘priestly’ function of legitimating political authority.”¹⁰² Christian and/or Judeo-Christian-derived forms of secular order, in this view, are among the core values of Western civilization and help constitute the common ground upon which Western democracy rests. Religion plays an important constitutive role not outside but within secular politics, serving what Jelen describes as “the basis of an ethical consensus without which popular government could not operate.”¹⁰³ This narrative draws on what Casanova describes as a “celebratory Protestant reading of modernity, going from Hegel’s Early Theological Writings through the Weber-Troeltsch axis to Talcott Parson’s interpretation of modern societies as the institutionalization of Christian principles.”¹⁰⁴

In the laicist narrative, the Christian identity of the West has been superseded, radically transformed, and for all practical purposes rendered irrelevant. A modern, rational West was reinvented and rejuvenated by democratic tendencies inherited from its Greek and Roman predecessors. The Judeo-Christian secularist story does not share the assumption that after the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, linkages between Western politics and public forms of Christianity were definitively severed. It works out of a different set of assumptions about the relationship between Christianity and modern political identities and institutions. Rather than eschewing religion, it draws upon and rephrases earlier European arrangements in which church and state each represented a different aspect of the same divine authority, as Gedicks describes:

Prior to the Reformation . . . the concepts “religious” and “secular” did not exist as descriptions of fundamentally different aspects of society. Although there clearly was tension and conflict in the relation between church and state during this time, the state was not considered to be nonreligious. Both church and state were part of the Christian foundation upon which medieval society was built.¹⁰⁵

The Reformation led to the distillation of two separate spheres of influence: the spiritual, led by the church, and the temporal, overseen by the state. Luther and Calvin revived and strengthened Augustine’s concepts of the “city of God” and the “city of men,” which described two aspects of the sovereign authority of God as embodied in the church and the state. However, they also made this split more fundamental by claiming that “God had instituted two kingdoms on earth, one spiritual to be ruled by the church, and the other temporal to be ruled by a civil sovereign.”¹⁰⁶

In the United States, the sense of a larger Christian context within which both church and state were embedded set the terms of public discourse until quite recently, and at certain times and places it still does.¹⁰⁷ Following the influx of immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, it became politically expedient to couch political programs in increasingly nonsectarian terms to ensure success at the polls.¹⁰⁸ While Protestant discourse took a back seat to a more generic civic religion, a de facto Protestant establishment continued to set the ground rules: “Protestantism still affected public business, but implicitly, more as the source and background of political movements than as the movements themselves.”¹⁰⁹

The civic republican imagination of the Protestant majority in early America formed the basis of a particular understanding and practice of religion and democratic politics. The Protestant influence in early America was evident in Legislative prayer, state acknowledgment of Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Christian Sabbath, and the outlawing of blasphemy and punishment of atheism.¹¹⁰ Protestants “opposed a particular Protestant denomination to Protestantism in general, which later they did not equate with an establishment. The notion of prayer and worship based on the Bible accepted by all Protestants did not amount to a general establishment, but constituted an essential foundation of civilization.”¹¹¹ To be secular, in this line of reasoning, meant not to privilege one Protestant denomination over another. The “common ground” of Protestant civilization was taken for granted, with dissenting Christians and others excluded from it. It is worth noting that a similar situation prevailed contemporaneously in England. In his analysis of nineteenth-century debates between British evangelicals and their utilitarian rivals, Van der Veer finds that, despite their differences, both sides agreed that “civil society and the forms of knowledge on which it was based were ultimately part and parcel of Christian civilization.”¹¹²

This Protestant claim to a common ground, though slowly eroded by the increasing religious diversification of the American population and eventually modified to incorporate both Catholic and, after World War II, Jewish influences, has retained a cultural foothold in the modern imaginary. It is out of a celebratory reading and cautious amendment of this cultural inheritance that the Judeo-Christian secularist narrative emerged and continues to shape modern dispositions toward the secular and the place of religion within it. The tradition of Judeo-Christian secularism is the cultural heir of a de facto Protestant establishment. A narrative of Protestant hegemony has been transformed in the American imaginary into a slightly more liberalized pluralism, still drawing sustenance from a tradition in which particular religions (first Protestant Christianity, then Christianity more broadly, then Judaism) are linked to the possibility of civilization and cited as the source of first principles for governing institutions. Tocqueville described this famously in reference to the United States:

In the United States it is not only mores that are controlled by religion, but its sway extends over reason. . . . So Christianity reigns without obstacles by universal consent. . . . Thus while the law allows the American people to do everything; there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to become. . . . Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions.¹¹³

Following in Tocqueville’s footsteps, Bellah, Connolly, Juergensmeyer, Taylor, Van der Veer, Morone, and Pizzorno have chronicled the ways in which religious tradition resonates in and is rephrased through modern varieties of liberalism and secularism.¹¹⁴ Morone paints a lively portrait of American history in which the nation develops “not from religious to secular but from revival to revival.”¹¹⁵ Connolly points to a tendency in canonical liberal thinkers, such as J. S. Mill, to extol Judeo-Christian tradition as the moral basis of civilizational unity and identity. For Mill, Connolly suggests, it is “through Jewish and Christian culture above all that a territorial people acquires the civilizational conditions of possibility for representative government.”¹¹⁶ Van der Veer identifies a long tradition of combining liberalism and evangelical moralism in Anglo-American political thought, describing British Liberal leader William Gladstone’s (1809–98) writings as invoking a “liberal view of progress . . . but added to this is the notion that progress is the Christian improvement of society and that in such progress we see the hand of God.”¹¹⁷ Charles Taylor describes a “common ground” mode of secularism, in which members of a political community agree upon an ethic of peaceful coexistence and political order based on doctrines common to all Christian sects, or even to all theists.¹¹⁸ He suggests that this represented a successful compromise in Europe for warring sects because “political injunctions that flowed from this common core trumped the demands of a particular confessional allegiance.”¹¹⁹ The objective was not to expel religion from politics in the name of an independent ethic, as in laicism, but to prevent the state from backing one (Christian) confession over another by appealing to that which all held in common. This even-handedness between religious traditions was, according to Taylor, the basis of the original American separation of church and state,¹²⁰ indicating the role that varieties of secularism have played as strategies for the management of religious diversity and religious pluralism.

Judeo-Christian secularism differs from laicism in that it does not aspire or claim to exclude religion (understood as Christianity or Judaism or values they hold in common) from modern spheres of power and authority. It diverges from laicism with regard to the role of religious tradition in the establishment and maintenance of the secularist “separation” of church and state. While laicism works on the assumption that religion has receded out of modern spheres of authority and into the private realm or disappeared altogether, Judeo-Christian secularism is a variant of what Jelen calls religious “accommodationism,” maintaining that “religion (singular) is ultimately good for democratic politics, because a shared adherence to a common religious tradition provides a set of publicly accessible assumptions within which democratic politics can be conducted.”¹²¹ The separation of church and state is envisioned and experienced as a unique Western achievement that emerged out of a shared adherence to a common set of European religious and political traditions. Christianity, as van Leeuwan argued, led to modern secularism.

In international relations, these assumptions are palpable in arguments portraying various religious traditions as sources of particular styles and institutions of governance, forms of civilizational identity, and clashes between so-called civilizations. Christianity, in some versions, Judeo-Christianity in others, has culminated in the unique Western achievement of the separation of church and state and the development of liberal democracy.¹²² As Samuel Huntington argued, “Western Christianity, first Catholicism and then Protestantism, is historically the single most important characteristic of Western civilization.”¹²³ This prevailing dualism between “God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual and temporal authority . . . contributed immeasurably to the development of freedom in the West” and shaped a number of “the factors which enabled the West to take the lead in modernizing itself and the world.”¹²⁴ Religion is the bedrock of this cultural inheritance, differentiating between civilizations and between individuals: “In the modern world, religion is a central, perhaps the central, force that motivates and mobilizes people.”¹²⁵

Huntington’s framework divides the world into those who share the Judeo-Christian common ground and those who do not. It is strikingly similar to the divisions proposed in the fourteenth century by an Italian jurist, Bartolus de Sassoferato, who divided the world into five classes: the “populus Romanus,” or “almost all those who obey the Holy Mother Church,” and four classes of “populus extranei”: the Turks, the Jews, the Greeks, and the Saracens.¹²⁶ Bartolus’s scheme parallels Huntington’s seven or eight major civilizations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and “possibly African.” Anthony Pagden describes its effects:

The effect of Bartolus’s ethnic division is once again to limit “the world” to a distinct cultural, political, and in this case religious, community. And again it places boundaries between what may be counted as the domain of the fully human world, and those others—which because of their rejection of the hegemony of the Western Church now also included the Greeks—who have no place within the civitas, and so no certain claim upon the moral considerations of those who do.¹²⁷

The assumption that a Judeo-Christian secular common ground ends abruptly at the edge of Western civilization leads to the defense of this ground against both internal and external enemies, resulting in what Connolly has called “civilizational wars of aggressive defense of Western uniqueness.”¹²⁸ These can become aggressive as the common ground is challenged both internally and externally in a world made up not only of Christians and Jews but also Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, and Deleuzeans, among others. As Taylor observes, “With the widening band of religious and metaphysical commitments in society, the ground originally defined as common becomes that of one party among others.”¹²⁹ At this juncture, either this (mythical) common ground is renegotiated or an aggressive defense of it is set in motion. Neuhaus opts for the latter, arguing that the godless are incapable of a “morally convincing account” of the nation, and concluding that “those who believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus turn out to be the best citizens.”¹³⁰

This religio-secular triumphalism finds expression in international relations in the idea that Western powers have a monopoly over the proper relationship between religion and politics. As Keane argues:

The principle of secularism, which “represents a realisation of crucial motifs of Christianity itself” (Bonhoffer), is arguably founded upon a sublimated version of the Christian belief that Christianity is “the religion of religions” (Schleiermacher), and that Christianity is entitled to decided for non-Christian others what they can think or say—or even whether they are capable of thinking and saying anything at all.¹³¹

This position normalizes particular religions and religious actors and marginalizes most non-Western and non-Judeo-Christian negotiations of religion and politics. If the dualism between spiritual and temporary authority is accepted as uniquely Western and Judeo-Christian, then non-Westerners who want to democratize have no alternative but to adopt Western forms of secularism. As Bernard Lewis puts it:

Separation of church and state was derided in the past by Muslims when they said this is a Christian remedy for a Christian disease. It doesn’t apply to us or to our world. Lately, I think some of them are beginning to reconsider that, and to concede that perhaps they may have caught a Christian disease and would therefore be well advised to try a Christian remedy.¹³²

In this scenario non-Westerners who do not advocate for Western (Christian) forms of secularism are portrayed as children who refuse to acknowledge that they are sick and need to stay in. On the other hand, those who do advocate for separationism are subject to the charge that they are advancing pale imitations of a robust Western secular ideal, thereby departing from (and potentially betraying) indigenous tradition. This binary delegitimizes indigenous trajectories of secularization because they are associated with selling out to Western power and betraying local tradition rather than being seen as legitimate alternatives. The oppositional relationship between Euro-American secular politics and forms of political Islam, such that the latter is categorically assumed to be a threat to the former, is a direct consequence of this worldview.¹³³

Honig describes two conflicting political impulses: the desire to decide undecidabilities, and the will to contest established institutions and identities.¹³⁴ She criticizes political theorists who limit their definition of politics to the “juridical, administrative or regulative tasks of stabilizing moral and political subjects, building consensus, maintaining agreements, or consolidating communities and identities.”¹³⁵ Rather than theorizing politics, she argues, they displace it.¹³⁶

Like their counterparts in political theory, scholars of international relations yearn for closure and consensus, at least regarding religion and politics. As Michael Barnett points out, “Actors struggle over the power and the right to impose a legitimate vision of the world because doing so helps to construct social reality as much as it expresses it.”¹³⁷ For most political scientists this is a secular vision of the world and a secular social reality. Most of us, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps less so, think, work, struggle against, and live within variations of the two traditions of secularism described in this essay. These secular laws, institutions, and sensibilities do not merely reflect social reality; they construct it, providing “a set of parameters, focal points, or even points of contention around which political discourse revolves.”¹³⁸ They are forms of discipline that facilitate closure and agreement around received cultural, political, and legal settlements of the relation between religion and politics. Secularism, it turns out, is a powerful “pattern of political rule.”¹³⁹

The politics of secularism falls just beyond the peripheral vision of the empiricist and rational-choice methods that have dominated mainstream American political science, and consequently, it has only recently been subject to sustained analysis in this discipline. Secularist settlements are sustained by a variety of assumptions: secularization as the most recent step in the worldly realization of Judeo-Christian morality, secularization as the natural evolution toward a universal morality that has transcended the need for metaphysical moorings, secularization as a commendable side-effect of democratization and economic and political modernization, and secularization as the triumphant globalization of a modern state system in which religion has been privatized once and for all, among others. Though often jostling with each other for supremacy, and sometimes colliding head-on, these powerful narratives and projects serve, for better or for worse, to manage religious diversity, imbue state interest and identity with meaning, secure an image of contemporary international order as modern, secular, and democratic, and normalize particular religions and religious actors as fit or unfit for participation in politics both within and above the level of the state.

The entanglements between these secularist formations and various religious traditions, real or imagined, and real because they are imagined, confirm Barnett’s observation in this volume that secular and religious elements in international order are not as cleanly segregated as many international relations theorists may have assumed. As Bruno Latour concludes, “What sort of world is it that obliges us to take into account, at the same time and in the same breath, the nature of things, technologies, sciences, fictional beings, religions large and small, politics, jurisdictions, economies and unconsciousnesses? Our own, of course.”¹⁴⁰

This chapter is based on “Varieties of Secularism,” chapter 2 of my book The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Excerpts from the book are reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press.

1. Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 33–36.

2. Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 216.

3. William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1999), 73–96.

4. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2.

5. Jose Casanova, “A Reply to Talal Asad,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, eds. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 23.

6. Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

7. Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, “Power in International Politics,” International Organization 59 (Winter 2005): 48.

8. Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 51.

9. “Social life is not simply a matter of systems of meaning . . . These anthropological tendencies which accord a critical priority to systems of human meaning . . . leave unposed the question of how different forms of discourse come to be materially produced and maintained as authoritative systems.” Talal Asad, “Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology,” Man 14, no. 4 (1979): 618–19.

10. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), chapter 1.

11. Peter van der Veer, “The Moral State: Religion, Nation, and Empire in Victorian Britain and British India,” in Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, eds. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 39.

13. Ibid., 30. See also Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).

23. William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 189.

25. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983); David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Martha C. Nussbaum, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18.

26. William E. Connolly, “Europe: A Minor Tradition,” in Powers of the Secular Modern, 80.

27. Carl Schmitt Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986).

28. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 1.

29. Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 16; Arend Theodor van Leeuwen, Christianity in World History: The Meeting of the Faiths of East and West, trans. H.H. Hoskins (New York: Scribner’s, 1964).

35. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), cited in William E. Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 150.

36. John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 200.

37. John L. Esposito, “Islam and Secularism in the Twenty-First Century,” in Islam and Secularism in the Middle East, eds. John L. Esposito and Azzam Tamimi (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 9.

38. Partha Chatterjee, “The Politics of Secularization in Contemporary India,” in Powers of the Secular Modern, 60.

40. Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Bhargava, Secularism and Its Critics, 33.

43. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann, introduction to Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 10.

44. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “the Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999), 11.

45. Scott Thomas argues that this applies equally to the English School in “Faith, History and Martin Wight: The Role of Religion in the Historical Sociology of the English School of International Relations,” International Affairs 77, no. 4 (2001): 926.

46. Peter Katzenstein, “Multiple Modernities and Secular Europeanization?” in Religion in an Expanding Europe, ed. Peter Katzenstein and Timothy Byrnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31

47. Scott M. Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 33.

48. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 353.

49. Alessandro Pizzorno, “Politics Unbound,” in Changing Boundaries of the Political, ed. Charles S. Maier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 34.

50. See also Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

51. Stephen D. Krasner, “Westphalia and All That,” in Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change, ed. Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 238.

52. Stephen D. Krasner, “Sovereignty,” Foreign Policy, January/February 2001, 21. On the alleged violation of state autonomy in the Westphalian settlement by provisions enforcing religious toleration that undermined the principle of cuius regio, eius religio see Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, 77–84.

53. William T. Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (October 1995):398–400.

54. Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997), 70.

55. This is not to ignore the deep divisions among Christians in Europe at the time. As Nexon observes, “when we view Europeanization as a long historical process, we inevitably confront the creation of Europe as a community through, first, the extrusion of religious difference and, second, the management of religious schism within a broader Latin Christian community” (Daniel Nexon, “Religion, European Identity, and Political Contention in Historical Perspective,” in Katzenstein and Byrnes, Religion in an Expanding Europe, 260).

56. Charles Taylor, Seminar on Secularization, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, Spring 2003. This argument is elaborated in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

57. Treaty of Osnabrück (1648), 240, 241, article VII, cited in Krasner, Sovereignty, 81.

60. Joshua Mitchell, remarks made during the Conference on Theology, Morality, and Public Life (University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, February 25–27, 2003).

61. Ashis Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,” in Bhargava, Secularism and Its Critics, 129.

62. Richard Falk, “Religion and Politics: Verging on the Postmodern,” Alternatives 13 (1988): 381.

63. T. N. Madan, “Secularism in Its Place,” Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 4 (November 1987): 754.

64. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 46.

65. Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Authority in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

66. Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds., State Sovereignty as a Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

68. “In the discourse of modernity ‘the secular’ presents itself as the ground from which theological discourse was generated” (Asad, Formations of the Secular, 192).

69. Pizzorno, “Politics Unbound,” in Maier, Changing Boundaries of the Political, 28.

70. David Scott, “Conversion and Demonism: Colonial Christian Discourse and Religion in Sri Lanka,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 2 (1992): 333.

72. Derrida argues that relegere is from legere (to “harvest” or “gather”) and is a Ciceronian tradition continued by W. Otto, J.-B. Hollmann, and Benveniste. He notes also a second etymological source of the word religio: religare, from ligare (to “tie” or “bind”), and traces this tradition from Lactantius and Tertuliian to Kobbert, Ernout-Meillet, and Pauly Wissola. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, trans. David Webb (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 34–35.

73. King, Orientalism and Religion, 36. The only restriction on religio in the Roman context was that practices were not allowed to impinge upon acceptance of civic responsibilities.

76. Lactantius, Institutiones Divinae IV.28, trans. Sister M. F. McDonald, 1964, 318–320, cited in King, Orientalism and Religion, 36.

79. Immanuel Kant, “To Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch,” in Humphrey, Perpetual Peace, and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals, 125.

80. Joseph Endelin de Joinville, “On the Religion and Manners of the People of Ceylon,” Asiatick Researches 7 (1803): 397–444, cited in Scott, “Conversion and Demonism,” 347.

81. King, Orientalism and Religion, 37. My thanks to Courtney Bender for her comments and suggestions.

90. Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 140.

92. Melani McAlister makes this argument with regard to gender in Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 232.

94. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 5.

95. See, for example, the biological references to Islamism as a contagion in French media coverage of the dispute surrounding a 2004 law prohibiting conspicuous religious symbols in public schools, discussed in John Bowen, Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

96. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 6.

97. Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

98. For a discussion of “secular witnesses belonging to the Judeo-Christian tradition” and the attempt to come to terms with their response to suicide bombing that is suggestive of one way in which this categorization may be helpful, see Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 91.

99. For another variation see Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005).

100. Damon Linker, “Without a Doubt: A Catholic Priest, a Pious President, and the Christianizing of America,” New Republic, April 3, 2006. On Neuhaus’s philosophy, see Richard John Neuhaus, Catholic Matters: Confusion, Controversy, and the Splendor of Truth (New York: Basic Books, 2006); The Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984); and The Catholic Moment (New York: HarperCollins, 1990). For two very different critiques, see Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (New York: Doubleday, 2006); and Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House,” 410–412.

102. Ted Jelen, To Serve God and Mammon: Church-State Relations in American Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 11. On the sacred canopy, see Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967); and Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square.

104. Casanova, “A Reply to Talal Asad,” in Scott and Hirschkind, Powers of the Secular Modern, 21.

105. Frederick Mark Gedicks, “The Religious, the Secular, and the Antithetical,” Capital University Law Review 20, no. 1 (1991): 116.

107. Today in the United States, seven states still have provisions barring atheists from holding office, though technically these provisions are unenforceable according to the supremacy clause of the Constitution. While the Supreme Court reaffirmed that federal law prohibits states from requiring any kind of religious test for officeholders in 1961, hostility toward atheists persists in many regions. See “In North Carolina, Lawsuit is Threatened Over Councilman’s Lack of Belief in God,” New York Times, December 12, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/us/13northcarolina.html?_r=2.

111. Thomas Curry, The First Freedoms, 123–4, cited in Gedicks, “Religious, the Secular, and the Antithetical,” 123n30.

112. Peter van der Veer, “The Moral State: Religion, Nation, and Empire in Victorian Britain and British India,” in Van der Veer and Lehmann, Nation and Religion, 28.

113. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 292.

114. See Robert Bellah’s concept of American civil religion in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and Juergensmeyer’s argument on American nationalism as a blend of secular nationalism and the symbols of Christianity into a form of “civil religion” in The New Cold War? 28.

115. James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 3.

122. Samuel P. Huntington, “Religious Persecution and Religious Relevance in Today’s World,” in The Influence of Faith: Religious Groups and U.S. Foreign Policy, ed. Elliot Abrams (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 60.

123. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 70.

126. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 28. Saracen is a Greek word that was synonymous with Arab in pre-Islamic times and referred to Arabic-speaking Muslims of indeterminate race in medieval times. After the twelfth century it became synonymous with Muslim, like the terms Turk and Moor. Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 181n5.

131. John Keane, “Secularism?” in Religion and Democracy, ed. David Marquand and Ronald L. Nettler (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 14.

133. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “Political Islam and Foreign Policy in Europe and the United States,” Foreign Policy Analysis 3, no. 4 (October 2007): 345–367.

134. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 201.

137. Michael Williams, “Hobbes and International Relations: A Reconsideration,” International Organization 50, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 213–37, cited in Michael Barnett, Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 250.

138. Bukovansky, Legitimacy and Power Politics: The American and French Revolutions in International Political Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 25.

139. Talal Asad, “Responses,” in Scott and Hirschkind, Powers of the Secular Modern, 219.

140. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 129.