Western academics who use concepts like "culture" and "society" cannot adopt a simple attitude to religion and are never quite as secular as they think, writes Bruce Robbins* Three years after the death of Edward W Said, the ideal of "secular criticism" that he championed throughout his career suddenly seems timid and imperilled. Secularism has never had more than a fragile hold in the United States. But the notorious religiosity of the American population at large, which contrasts sharply with the relative indifference to religion of other nations at a comparable level of economic development, has come to be reflected increasingly in the thinking of American intellectuals. American intellectuals tend to think of themselves as an unrepresentative minority, proudly alienated from the beliefs of the less educated majority. But today they are very, very careful when they speak of secularism -- the same secularism that many of their critics think defines them. The word "post-secular", which is heard more and more often in intellectual circles, hints that we have entered into a new era, an era when confident distinctions between the secular and the religious are no longer publicly acceptable. One wonders what Edward Said would say. One plausible reason for this sea change is the extended presidency of George W Bush. In the aftermath of each Bush victory commentators wondered whether he won (if indeed he did win) because of his appeal to religious voters. Not only had Bush, a self-declared "born-again" Christian, insisted that God was on his side in invading Afghanistan and Iraq, but his campaign also hit his Democratic opponents hard on their support for "cultural" issues, like abortion and gay rights, on which many religious voters were at one with the Republicans. Many concluded, therefore, that in opposing Bush's policies a way must be found to "engage" with religion, if only for practical political purposes. But the causes of this anti-secular shift also come from within and they go much deeper than merely instrumental motives. The doctrine of multiculturalism, which dominates American intellectual life both conceptually and institutionally, leads logically from respect for cultural difference to respect for religious difference. If "everything is cultural," then isn't the same true for religion? From here it is a small step to a respect for religion so profound that it undercuts respect for non- religious analysis. The influence of Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt over currently fashionable thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Chantal Mouffe and Giorgio Agamben, an influence which is one of the themes of Vincent Pecora's valuable and incisive book, has encouraged the view that in effect there is nothing outside religion. According to this view, secularism's pretence of having escaped from religion is just another religious position, but one that hypocritically pretends to be something more than it is. As Pecora points out, the "everything is religion" idea comes dangerously close to the essentialism of Samuel Huntington, whose infamous "clash of civilizations" thesis shares Schmitt's Hobbesian view of a world destined to suffer inevitable conflict along the lines of religious heritage. I don't think anything made Edward Said more furious. And yet this position has become attractive to members of the left, in part again because of political events. Though Bush speaks as if American soldiers in Iraq were doing the will of God, much of the support that made the war possible came from reasoning that on the contrary saw itself as secular, especially the notion of universal human rights. Secularism has to answer the charge that, grossly speaking, belief in human rights comes from Christianity, Christianity has always served the imperial aims of Europe and the project of human rights is continuing to serve those same imperial ends. This is the logic, for example, of anthropologist Talal Asad. If we accept it, Pecora writes, then the notion of human rights as universal, "so central to a humanist like Said," must be seen as "no more than a projection of secularized Christianity". Thus conflict cannot be cushioned or mediated by any putatively neutral discourse (which secularism hoped to be), any Rawlsian "overlapping consensus". If there is nothing outside religion, then there are no norms of judgment that allow a given religion to be criticised except in its own terms. If there is no secularism, then in the strong sense there is no critique. Pecora does not seem pleased with this intellectual terminus. And in the end, I think, he speaks quite forcefully against it. But Secularization and Cultural Criticism does not rush to the defence of its two titular terms. It may hesitate to do so in part because of the pressure of events: the bad behaviour of the French government in the "headscarf" affair, and so on. But the book spends little time on the headlines. It gives most of its attention to the purely intellectual history that has led to this intense questioning of secular criticism. As many have noted, the concept of secularisation is ambiguous. Does it signal 1) an absolute rupture with religion, or 2) a transfer of religious structures of thought and feeling to non-religious objects, in other words a means of keeping religion alive in some other form? History suggests, for better or worse, that the second option is the more frequent. Since the Romantic reaction that followed the Industrial and French Revolutions, the critique of secular rationality has always had a large place in European intellectual life. Thus Pecora suggests that European and American intellectuals have always had a "love-hate relationship with religion". Much of the critique of European Enlightenment happened, he argues, within Europe -- and, I think he would want to add, within the Enlightenment. To claim that this critique is internal to the Enlightenment is of course to defend the Enlightenment indirectly by attributing to it the power of self-criticism. This seems to be one of Pecora's strategies. Another is to show what price European thought has paid for the "love" side of this love-hate relationship. He points out that 19th-century European intellectuals tended not to see religion as simple error, as might have been expected. Instead, they came to see it as basic to all social cohesion, whether the society in question was European or non- European, ancient or modern. In a chapter on Durkheim, Pecora shows how the concept of "society", as it developed within 19th- and 20th-century sociology, became identified with the sacred. "The discovery of the social behind the sacred, which at the same time opened the way for the transformation of the social into the sacred, was an indispensable part of the flourishing of a modern sensibility." When sociology uses the dynamics of social cohesion to explain, for example, why the number of suicides rises or falls, the concept of society on which this explanation is based is religious not in the trivial sense (the fact that terms like Weber's "charisma" have a religious origin) but in a much more profound one. With all the explanatory powers attributed to it, society can hardly be conceived of at all except as an extension of the sacred. Hence the "modern sensibility" might look anti-religious but it contains strong religious elements even when and where it thinks itself most secular, as in the social sciences. In a chapter on Matthew Arnold Pecora suggests that something similar happened with the concept of "culture", which thus enters into contemporary Cultural Studies carrying more religious baggage than it is ready to acknowledge. It is no surprise, then, that Western academics who use concepts like "culture" and "society" cannot adopt a simple attitude to religion and are never quite as secular as they think. Nor is it a surprise that they find it so difficult to criticise other people's cultures. The moral of Pecora's story is perhaps that social science needs better concepts, which is to say more secular ones. The effort to cleanse our concepts, including both "culture" and "society", might have provided the narrative line for a different but complementary story about the thinking of the last two or three decades. Storytelling is an important part of Pecora's case. Despite the general disavowal of cultural evolutionism, he observes, the conflation of secularism with modernity continues to sustain the terribly misleading idea that everyone must follow the same developmental path, a path on which some are ahead, others behind. "The historical narrative of the advent of secular rationality in the West is almost never told as if it were reversible, as if the West would one day return, for example, to a medieval religious cosmology." Making our stories reversible would be, so to speak, a huge step forward. Thus Pecora asks us to imagine alternative modernities -- one example would be ways of allowing religion to thrive outside the confining Western category of the "private". And he asks us to try to tell the secularism story without a telos. The book turns a corner when it discusses Walter Benjamin, who famously combined Marxism with elements of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin's use by Western intellectuals as a way of having their religion while disavowing it. Pecora doesn't say openly that he disapproves of this, but he quietly juxtaposes Benjamin with Siegfried Kracauer, a near- contemporary who persuasively rejected the mystical elements in Benjamin. Kracauer also tried to define a concept of progress that would not lend itself, like Hegel's meta-narrative of Spirit, to arrogance and complacency. This is perhaps the section of the book where Pecora comes closest to exposing his own views. Like Kracauer, he too seems to see secularism as a legitimate goal, and one that is difficult to achieve, rather than an illusory possession that certain people and certain countries can boast of possessing. Nothing could better fit with Edward Said's insistence on the secular as the realm of strenuous human effort. It has always been tempting for secularists to think of secularism as what is left when superstition is eliminated. In this sense, secularism is imagined as an emptiness with no history of its own. Pecora wants to restore the fullness of its history. Showing that secularism was produced by historical causes, including both Western and non-Western religions, might seem to diminish secularism's authority. For these causes are (like everything else) ethically and epistemologically local, questionable, relative. But by filling in some of the missing history and conceding some of the open questions and weaknesses it has produced, Pecora only makes secularism stronger. * The writer is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress ( 1999 ) , Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture ( 1993 ) and The Servant's Hand: English Fiction From Below ( 1986 ) .
