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To appear in Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies edited by Robert Orsi
THINKING ABOUT RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND POLITICS
Talal Asad
Since the closing decade of the millennium social friction generated by the presence of substantial numbers of Muslim immigrants in Europe and the threat of
Muslim terrorists have given a new impetus to the fear of politicized religion. Violent and intolerant “Fundamentalist movements” have emerged not only in the Muslim world
(although these are the most frightening in the West) but also in India, Israel and the
United States. The secular values of liberal democracy are under siege. Or so much of the
Western media tell us. Academics who teach religious studies have responded eagerly, seeing in this an opportunity to demonstrate the public relevance of their expertise. What is to be done about the dangers to liberal democracies of religious belief?
More generally one may ask: what are the relations between the secular promise of liberal democracy and the conditions for private belief in transcendence? There is no simple answer to this question, of course, because modern religion has both hindered and aided “liberal” values, and because liberal values are more contradictory and ambiguous than is sometimes acknowledged. But I want to begin with other questions: What is
“religion”? How has it come to be defined in the ways it has? What are some of the political consequences of making belief central to the definition? I’ll address these questions by discussing some aspects of Charles Taylor’s work, A Secular Age in which he argues that secularization cannot be narrated as a simple subtraction story (i.e., as the gradual abandonment of superstition and intolerance) but must take the form of an account of historical re-making in which the choice of belief and unbelief come to have an equal and equally protected status in the liberal democratic state. I want to think beyond this very important point, however, and I’ll
THINKING ABOUT RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND POLITICS
Talal Asad
Since the closing decade of the millennium social friction generated by the presence of substantial numbers of Muslim immigrants in Europe and the threat of
Muslim terrorists have given a new impetus to the fear of politicized religion. Violent and intolerant “Fundamentalist movements” have emerged not only in the Muslim world
(although these are the most frightening in the West) but also in India, Israel and the
United States. The secular values of liberal democracy are under siege. Or so much of the
Western media tell us. Academics who teach religious studies have responded eagerly, seeing in this an opportunity to demonstrate the public relevance of their expertise. What is to be done about the dangers to liberal democracies of religious belief?
More generally one may ask: what are the relations between the secular promise of liberal democracy and the conditions for private belief in transcendence? There is no simple answer to this question, of course, because modern religion has both hindered and aided “liberal” values, and because liberal values are more contradictory and ambiguous than is sometimes acknowledged. But I want to begin with other questions: What is
“religion”? How has it come to be defined in the ways it has? What are some of the political consequences of making belief central to the definition? I’ll address these questions by discussing some aspects of Charles Taylor’s work, A Secular Age in which he argues that secularization cannot be narrated as a simple subtraction story (i.e., as the gradual abandonment of superstition and intolerance) but must take the form of an account of historical re-making in which the choice of belief and unbelief come to have an equal and equally protected status in the liberal democratic state. I want to think beyond this very important point, however, and I’ll