Secularism: Universal to the West, Provincial to Everywhere Else

Writing this week for Providence, RFI Senior Fellow Paul Marshall observes that in the West, including the United States, “many long-stable electoral patterns are disappearing.” “The reasons for this are myriad,” Marshall continues, “but one consistent theme is a fervent stress on identity. Everything may be challenged in a struggle to define who we are, personally and collectively.” Countries such as China, India, Russia, Iran, and others are not immune from this emphasis on identity, as they join western countries in increasingly defining “themselves in terms of their civilizational inheritance, often, as in any deep historical excavation, drawing on powerful religious currents.”

Marshall writes:

One feature frequently emphasized is that the West, while sometimes quite religious, has sought to demarcate specific realms of religious and political authority and thus is ‘secular,’ a word that embraces a wide range of disparate and often contradictory ideas.

While this sacred/secular demarcation of authority has in the past and in our time been misunderstood and even destructive, it can also serve to uphold religious freedom. Marshall continues:

In this context Kevin Flatt’s wide-ranging Secularization, Social Order, and World History is especially welcome and important. It is occasionally marred by dense theoretical prose since the author seeks to combine sociology, history, religious studies, and philosophy, but perhaps this provides necessary nuance for a very wide and complex subject.

Rather than treating secularization simply as ‘less religion,’ Flatt portrays it as a complex process that reshapes how communities understand, organize, and govern themselves, and make sense of changing social norms. He seeks to show how secularization has influenced both everyday life and large-scale institutions across different cultures and historical periods.

To this end, he analyses traditions in China, India, the Islamic world, and beyond, though not Latin America, to illustrate different understandings of ‘sacred-social order.’

He maintains that ‘the decline of religion’ is not some natural and inevitable quasi-Hegelian process but a revolutionary break that has in turn provoked worldwide movements attempting to defend and restore inherited sacred-social orders.

Read the full article: “Secularism: Universal to the West, Provincial to Everywhere Else.”