CA

LANDMARKS IN THE CRITICAL STUDY

OF SECULARISM
MATTHEW SCHERER
Union College

Rereading Talal Asads Formations of the Secular ([2003] hereafter, Formations)

together with William E. Connollys Why I Am Not a Secularist ([1999] hereafter,
Not a Secularist) has been an exhilarating experience, and also a humbling one. Not
only do these texts trace the constitution of modern secularism through arguments
made with great care and insight but also, more dauntingly, they establish shockingly
original perspectives from which to critique that formation. In the one book the
call for an as-yet-unattempted anthropology of the secular, and in the other the
argument that a largely uncontested theory of secularism is radically insufficient
to the key problems of contemporary politics, are landmarks in the emergence
of a new critical study of secularism. Indeed these interventions have shifted the
course of key debates about the nature and value of modern secularism that have
been standing a hundred years or more, and we as readersAsad and Connolly
themselves includedare still catching up with their implications. Doing justice
to the scope and subtlety of these texts is out of the question here, but in what
follows I aim to draw out some of their most important arguments, and to place
them in explicit conversation with one another. To do so, I pose six questions that
foreground Asads and Connollys approaches, draw out moments of productive
tension between their projects, invite reappraisal of their controversial claims,
and suggest some new directions that might be pursued in consequence of their
work.
C 2011 by
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 26, Issue 4, pp. 621632. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. 
the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01115.x

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26:4

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FIRST QUESTION: WHAT IS SECULARISM?

If this first question sounds naive, it may nonetheless serve to note the recurrence of fundamental disagreements about the significance of secularism in
todays discussions. In my view, the fact that our critical literatures on the secular,
secularity, secularism, and secularization are so muddled, that we are sent
around this question again and again, deserves serious attention. To begin, Not a
Secularist and Formations remain two of the most striking, ambitious, and important
restatements of the problem of secularism. They acknowledge the persistence of
familiar answers: That secularism is simply the separation of church and state.
That it is, more specifically, a form of separation that makes religion private while
making power and reason public. That secularism is an ideology. That it is a central
cognitive condition of modernity. That it is a key player in the leading narratives
about modernity. That it is an institutional formation that governs the conduct
of individuals and communities. And yet Asad and Connolly problematize these
familiar answers by divulging cases in which their terms are insufficiently accurate,
tracing the partiality of their historiographies, and pointing toward the contingency
of their boundaries.
In reframing the question, Formations argues not about secularism per se but
about the secular, and, in Asads words, it is a major premise of this study that the
secular is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism, that over time
a variety of concepts, practices, and sensibilities have come together to form the
secular (2003:16). The secular is substantial and concrete. It is a possible object
of anthropological analysis. It is one possibility among the many very different
possibilities for acting and being that have existed, and continue to exist, but it
is neither singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity, although it works
through a series of particular oppositions (Asad 2003:25). The secular is therefore
best approached indirectly by examining the various attitudes toward myth, pain,
cruelty, torture, agency, human rights, responsibility, ethics, and virtue informing
the practices and disciplines that produce, sustain, and regulate various human
subjects (Asad 2003:67). By way of comparison with the secular, secularism is
relatively easy to locate as a concept and a doctrine bound together with, or
centrally located within, a concept of modernity that has recently become
hegemonic as a political goal, however unequally it is attained in practice around
the globe (Asad 2003:1213). One of the innovations of Formations is to show
precisely how and why the secular is not reducible to secularism: The secular
bears on rudimentary attitudes toward the human body, it contributes to specific
ways of training, cultivating and structuring the senses, and it grounds operative

LANDMARKS IN THE CRITICAL STUDY OF SECULARISM

conceptions of the human in ways that exceed and complicate the aims articulated
by secularism. These formations of the secular enter into complex and at times
even contradictory relations with the worlds institutional varieties of secularism,
just as they do with its religious traditions.
In turn Not a Secularist takes neither secularism per se nor the secular as its
point of departure, but focuses instead on the conceits of secularism harbored
within the intellectual, spiritual, and political commitments of todays secularists.
The modus vivendi known as secularism could be the subject of a wide variety
of histories; as Connolly notes, You could tell one about the needs of capital
and commercial society to increase the range and scope of monetary exchange in
social relations. . . . Or you could concentrate on the challenge that nominalism
posed within Christianity to enchanted conceptions of the world in the medieval
era. . . . Or you could treat secularism as the loss of organic connections that can be
sustained only by general participation in a common Christian faith (1999:2021).
Secularists, nonetheless, tend to converge on a narrative that grounds secularism in
the practices of toleration, which followed Europes inter-Christian religious wars,
which followed the protestant reformation. And they typically prefer this story,
because it paints the picture of a self-sufficient public realm fostering freedom and
governance without recourse to a specific religious faith (Connolly 1999:21). This
story of secularism serves to bolster secularists self-representations as the partisans
of a freedom bound only by the limits of reason.
Perhaps more precisely, by suspending debates about its historical provenance
Connolly engages secularism as a particular political ideal, voiced in a certain way,
by identifiable constituencies. Insofar as secularists are partisans of a freedom
grounded in public reason, they constitute a tradition of political thought that
cuts across a wide range of specific relations to religion. John Locke, Immanuel
Kant, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Rawls, and Jurgen Habermasalthough they
practice, imagine, and identify themselves with Christianity and secularism in
different wayseach appear in turn as secularists. Secularists project an idealized
vision of political life that strains metaphysics out of politics and dredges out of
public life as much cultural density and depth as possible to secure the legitimate
authority of public reason and rational morality to govern within the territorial
boundaries of the nation-state until such a time as they can govern universally
(Connolly 1999:22, 23). In this view, secularism and secularists are determined
by a specific transformation and limitation of the contours of political life.
Formations and Not a Secularist sound out the layered sensibilities, obscured histories, and dense conceptual and practical networks that produce and sustain various

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forms of secularism, which in turn appear as unstable and mutable formations. To

draw questions from this: To what extent is secularism itself an essentially contested concept that is constantly open to reconfiguration? In what ways has the operative significance
of secularism shifted in the last ten years? To what extent has it become important to contest
or defend new aspects of the secular and new turns of secularism in line with these changes?

624

SECOND QUESTION: HOW IS SECULARISM RELATED

TO CHRISTIANITY?
Charles Taylors recent text, A Secular Age (2007), makes a subtle argument
about the emergence of a secular age that inherits and perfects a prior Christian
age. But Hegel put a similar thesis in bolder form in his Lectures on the Philosophy of
History, which conclude with the following formulations: the last stage in History,
our world, our own time, is one in which secular life is the positive and definite
embodiment of the Spiritual Kingdom, such that what has happened, and is
happening every day, is not only not without God, but is essentially His Work
(2004:442, 457). The roughly 200 years between Hegel and Taylor have seen an
almost endless variety of attempts to capture the connections between Christendom
and Europe or Euro-America. In more and less sophisticated registers, and in a
number of important contexts, secularisms relation to Christianity, the West, and
modernity remain live questions.
If Not a Secularist brilliantly diagnoses modern secularism as a distinctly
Kantian arrangement, marked by a particular emphasis on the authority and selfsufficiency of public reason, what could be called a Hegelian secularism has been
gaining ground recently. Where Kantian secularists emphasize the detachment of
secular reason from religious tradition, Hegelian secularists emphasize the work
done by a specifically Christian religious tradition in preparing secular reason,
and thus the continuity between this tradition and modern secularism. Secularist
discourses today tend to flicker between Hegelian and Kantian modes, pitching
secularism at times as an extension of Christianity and at times as a rebuke to
Christianity, although these two modes do not seem to be mutually exclusive.
For example, Habermass recent reflections on secularism would seem to play
the Kantian tradition strongly: I understand political liberalism (which I defend
in the specific form of Kantian republicanism) as a nonreligious, post-metaphysical
justification of the normative foundations of constitutional democracy (2009:102).
But he also embraces the historically significant role of Christianity in the specific
web of inheritance that marks modern Western reason in Hegelian fashion such
that, post-metaphysical thinking does not restrict itself to the heritage of Western

LANDMARKS IN THE CRITICAL STUDY OF SECULARISM

metaphysics but also reconfirms its internal relationship to those world religions
whose origins . . . date back to . . . the Axial Age . . . [so that] Greek concepts such
as autonomy and individuality, or Roman concepts such as emancipation and
solidarity, have long since been invested with meanings of JudeoChristian origin
(Habermas 2009:141142). Habermas stakes his current postsecularity, in part, in
the injunction that secularists should continue to learn from, inherit, and preserve
the unique reserve of moral insight particular to religion (or at least religion in
the JudeoChristian tradition). Charles Taylor, Marcel Gauchet, and Samuel
Huntington all take different tracks that press such a Hegelian stance further, as do
zek.
Michael Warner, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Zi
Rather than asking about religion as a ground for secularism, Formations asks
about the productive work performed on religious traditions by modern secularism.
It conceives secularism as a modern pattern of organizing public life, and it conceives
religion as a tradition that predates this distinctly modern pattern. When Formations
approaches their intersection, therefore, it draws attention to the ways in which
secularism tends to engage and transform the lattera process usually conceived of
as reform. More specifically still, it highlights the tendency of historically specific
concepts of the secular to place religions in a hierarchical order. Formations brings
to light, in other words, a process in which some kinds of religion are determined to
be compatible with liberal, democratic modernity, while others are not. To quote:
when it is proposed that religion can play a positive ethical role in modern society,
it is not intended that this apply to any religion whatever, but only to those religions
that are able and willing to enter the public sphere for the purpose of rational debate
with opponents who are to be persuaded rather than coerced (Asad 2003:183).
The question here is not so much, How is secularism connected to Christianity?
but more, How does secularisms connection with modern Christianity shape its
interactions with other religious traditions?
Not a Secularist broaches this problem in two related ways: it critically engages a
specifically U.S. Christian nationalism (chs. 3, 4, 5), and it questions the sufficiency
of a Kantian secularism often seen as the best alternative to nationalism (chs. 1,
2, 6, 7). Rendering the Kantian tradition of secularism contestable is one of the
texts key achievements, and it is through the reading of Kant that the question of
secularisms inheritance of Christianity appears most clearly. Although the Kantian
tradition clearly advertises its exclusion of theology, which it frames as dogmatism,
Not a Secularist argues that it cannot dissever itself as clearly from that cultural
heritage as it pretends. Kant himself grapples with what would seem to be an
ineliminable contamination of the will throughout his text on Religion within the

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Boundaries of Mere Reason, articulating a theory of radical evil that echoes the
Augustinian theory of original sin. Although the preface to Kants text indicates
that religion may be encompassed within a system of morality based on pure reason,
the text itselfand its argument about radical evil in particularhints that morality
depends on the Christian tradition more profoundly than Kant is willing to explicitly
allow. So cautious sentences appear, Not a Secularist notes, Formulations that at
first appear simply as limits upon reason with respect to grace may be read after
plumbing the predicament of the Kantian will as solicitation of a hope for grace
that stretches beyond the limits of reason alone (Connolly 1999:168). As much as
he would like to constrain religion within the bounds of reason, Kants conception
of radical evil, or more fundamentally and directly, his conceptions of the will,
responsibility and agency enmesh him within the intellectualspiritual tradition of
Western Christianitybolstering his position with common sense, and riddling it
with latent tensions and contradictions.
If a significant measure of Kantian moral and political thought inherits the
concepts and commitments of the Judaic and Christian traditions as well as their
confusions, such problems remain with us today as Not a Secularists discussion of the
politics of capital punishment shows. Americans support for capital punishment
depends on a dense conceptual network (freedom, will, responsibility) embodied
in individual dispositions enlivened by a particular spirituality. If the will is one of
those categories that has traveled the bumpy road into secularism from its inception
in the sacred discourses of Judaism and Christianity, it is also the case that a field of
ethicopolitical sensibilities and complex cultural/corporeal formation[s] subject
to the various experimental arts of the self lie beyond the simplicity of moral
and political life projected by Kantian secularism (Connolly 1999:115, 174). Not a
Secularist identifies certain parts of the Christian tradition that remain active within
the dense philosophical, cultural, and political background of modern secularism.
Rather than arguing that a generic Christianityor, slightly more specifically,
Protestant Christianityset the conditions for modern secularity, it suggests that
Kantian secularism and, for example, Augustinian Christianity emerge as responses
to the human predicament, which often overlap and filter into contemporary
political judgments.
To draw this into a question, it seems important to ask: Are Euro-American
secular discourses becoming more Hegelian and less Kantian, meaning that they increasingly
tie secularism to Christianity and to a story about Western civilization, rather than to the
exclusion of metaphysics and the purity of reason? If so, what new problems does such a
reorientation present?

LANDMARKS IN THE CRITICAL STUDY OF SECULARISM

THIRD QUESTION: CAN MODERN SECULARISM BE UNDERSTOOD

AS A PROCESS OF CONVERSION?
In addressing the connection between secularism and Christianity, Formations
comes to a formulation that could be shared by Not a Secularist: Secularists are
alarmed at the thought that religion should be allowed to invade the domain of
our personal choicesalthough the process of speaking and listening freely implies
precisely that our thoughts and actions should be opened up to change by
our interlocutors (Asad 2003:186, bold added). To my ear, this suggests that
an echoor transpositionof the problematic of religious conversion is central
to the secular conception of public life.
The possibility of deeply changing ones thoughts and actions also lies near the
center of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. For Kant explicitly thematizes
the process by which an individual reverses the moral order of his incentives to
overcome the problem of radical evil as a revolution in the disposition of the human
being such that a new man comes about through a kind of rebirth and a change
of heartin other words, Kant affords conversion a central place within Religion
Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1999:59, 68). Locke, a key early modern
proponent of the regimes of toleration that preceded modern secularism, similarly
understood conversion to play an important role in thinking about tolerationearly
modern debates about secularism it should be recalled were often debates about
the (im)propriety of forced religious conversion. As I have argued elsewhere, the
problem of conversion appears even within John Rawlss articulation of secularism,
despite his efforts to articulate a postmetaphysical theory (Scherer 2006).
The connection proposed here between the problem of modern secularism and
the figure of religious conversion should be surprising insofar as religious conversion
was explicitly excluded from the purview of political institutions, and from the
conceptual vocabulary of political thought, precisely as a concept of separation
became ascendent in early European modernity. A constitutive moment, in fact, of
the modern separation of public and private spheres consisted in excluding religious
conversion from public life and consigning it to the privatesuch is a plausible way
of understanding the core of the 17th-century debates over toleration. Although
this exclusion formed a precondition for a more tolerant politics, it also restricted
the theoretical vocabulary within which processes of social transformation could be
describedtoleration was purchased by introducing new regulations on the public
sphere and on speaking subjects, and it was also purchased at the cost of diminished
aspirations for a deep and genuine pluralism. As part of rethinking the possibilities
of modern secularism, it would seem worthwhile to ask how it might be possible to

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draw resources from religious traditions that have been excluded by the various
modes of secularism.
By promoting the principle of separation to a central place, the modern secular imaginary isolates a single part of a much larger, multifaceted process that
reshapes the specific practices, institutions, and discourses that condition experience in both political and religious domains. As Asad and Connolly both note,
this larger process has produced a series of variable boundaries between politics
and religion throughout historyand not just modern and Western history. In the
context of modern Euro-American secularism, I would like to suggest, this process
unfolds as a process of conversion; ironically, it is a process of conversion in which
modern secularism emerges by excluding religious conversion from public life, and
from its own narrative self-identity. Within the Augustinian tradition, wherein this
figure is given a distinctive cast, conversion refers to a transformational process
of ethical character formation and communal reorientation that is retrospectively
consolidated through the production of a new narrative self-identity. Such a figure
foregrounds the transformation of individuals in relation to communities mediated
by narrative, which is by no means merely a religious phenomenon, but occurs
instead within politics generally, and within the politics of modern secularism
specifically. Figuring the emergence of modern secularism as a process of conversion, I would suggest, might allow us to grasp how secularism has in fact emerged
in new, distinctly modern forms by reshaping institutions, practices, sensibilities,
communities, discourses, and yet how these transformations are both exaggerated
and catalyzed by the simplifying figure of secularism as the separation of church
and state posited through retrospective narration. One already sees in Augustines
writings that a process of conversion involving the complex disciplinary process of
ethical character formation is represented and refigured by a conversion narrative
that obscures, simplifies, and consolidates this work. In other words, the social
transformations that produced modern Euro-American secularism excluded forced
conversion from politics through a conversion of political and religious sensibilities,
a process that has since been obscured by a conversion narrative that simplifies and
obscures its outlines.
If modern secularism is produced through various exclusions of religion, in a
general sense, could opening secularism toward the future depend on reopening
various religious archives? More specifically, if secularism is bound to the problem
of excluding conversion in a historical sense, is it possible that recovering a figure of
conversion can illuminate the contours of secularism as a process of transformation
in a theoretical sense. Does it help to make sense of secularism, and of the nature of its

LANDMARKS IN THE CRITICAL STUDY OF SECULARISM

connection to Christianity (and perhaps other traditions as well), to view it as a process of

transformation figured as a process of conversion?

FOURTH QUESTION: PAIN, SUFFERING, AND THE LIMITS OF THE

SECULAR?
Meditations on pain and suffering are central to the arguments of Not a
Secularist and Formations, and both books characterize secularism in relation to
pain and suffering almost independently of secularisms commonplace foil and
complement, religion. Not a Secularist and Formations agree that a key motivation
for secularism is the perceived need to manage and potentially eliminate pain
and suffering. Not a Secularist argues that secularists often blind themselves to
certain forms of pain and suffering, more precisely that secular thinkers often
think that suffering is always easy to recognize and categorize and that to speak
more responsively to suffering is to contest that assumption (Connolly 1999:48).
Formations adds that secular liberal democracies harbor profound contradictions
with respect to pain, which appear when they inflict unavowable suffering, for
example, through torture. It charts a different course by opening larger questions
about how the body lives pain and punishment, compassion and pleasure, hope and
fear as a way of probing the formation of the secular more deeply (Asad 2003:99).
Formations attributes the imperative to master and eliminate pain to a highly
specific formation of the secular, while Not a Secularist frames the response to
suffering as part of the human predicament. To quote the latter,

People suffer. We suffer from illness, disease, unemployment, dead-end jobs,

bad marriages, the loss of loved ones, social relocation, tyranny, police brutality, street violence, existential anxiety, guilt, envy, resentment, depression,
stigmatization, rapid social change, sexual harassment, child abuse, poverty,
medical malpractice, alienation, political defeat, toothaches, the loss of selfesteem, identity-panic, torture, and fuzzy categories. [Asad 2003:47]
As this catalog suggests, the management of pain and suffering is an extraordinary
focal point that draws together a wide range of tendencies generally taken to
characterize the modern condition. For example: The biopolitical problem of
governing populations through the management of bodies depends in significant
part on producing, measuring, and medicalizing pain. Utilitarian or economic
calculations take pleasure and pain as the basis for public policy. After theodicy,
modernity faces a new existential problem of interpreting and justifying lifes

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painful experiences in the perceived absence of transcendent explanations. More

examples are possible.
This leads me to ask: In what sense are the responses to pain (and certain failures
to respond to pain) secular or secularist, rather than, say, modern, liberal, American,
capitalist, technological, medical, or simply Kantian? In other words, can something like
the secular be reliably identified in the absence of a precise relation to religion, such as
in the case of secular attitudes toward pain? It may be that the secular is approximately
coextensive with the modern as the site and condition of almost everything in the world
today, but something seems to be lost in extending the category in this way, in much the same
way that something is lost through the inflation and overextension of once precise categories
of analysis, such as Neoliberalism, or through the scholarly deployment of the concept of
religion, which, as Talal Asads work has done so much to show, was never as accurate
as it should have been. A more general way of putting this is to ask: are there identifiable
conceptual and practical limits to the secular?

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FIFTH QUESTION: IF IT IS NOT SECULARISM, IS A DEEP

MULTIDIMENSIONAL PLURALISM STILL SECULAR?
Not a Secularist responds to a crisis of secularism stimulated by such factors as
the minoritization of the world, the accelerating pace of life, the renationalization
of populations, and the denationalization of capital (Connolly 1999:113). It does
so in part by identifying the centrality of the Kantian tradition to secularism, and
by contesting this tradition from the perspective of a politics of deep, multidimensional pluralism attentive to the importance of arts of the self in sustaining an
ethos of public life better suited to the challenges of late modernity. The argument, however, is not presented as a wholesale rejection of secularism, but, rather,
a cautious reconfiguration (Connolly 1999:19). It suggests that authoritative images of public reason be downgraded, along with the fiction of a postmetaphysical
political discourse and the paradigm of secularism as the strict separation of politics
from religion. But this leaves open the question, to what extent is the openness to
engagement with others that characterizes critical responsiveness related to the
secular, and what connections might therefore be made between a possible deep
pluralism and a non-Kantian secularism? Formations argues that modernity brings a
new kind of subjectivity, one that is appropriate to ethical autonomy and aesthetic
self-inventiona concept of the subject that has a new grammar. One can imagine that the new grammar of the subject is in important ways a secular grammar,
and that this secular grammar is at the least resonant with the grammar of deep

LANDMARKS IN THE CRITICAL STUDY OF SECULARISM

multidimensional pluralism insofar as both posit a subject that is in principle open

to transformation (or as I would put it, a certain kind of conversion).
To put this more directly, if were not secularists, are we still secular? If one declines
to participate in Kantian secularismwhich would chiefly mean that one resists
the inclination to project ones own conceptions of public reason and morality as
the sole authoritative and universally binding possibilitiesand if one promotes
instead a project of deep multidimensional pluralism and critical responsiveness, to
what extent and in what ways does one remain secular, if not a secularist? Leaving Kantian
secularists aside for the moment, is pluralism nonetheless connected to the secular in the
sense given to this term in Formations? Is it one distinctive possibility opened by and for the
secular? And if secularism is being reconstituted today as a more explicitly and self-consciously
Euro-AmericanChristian formation (in the Hegelian rather than Kantian fashion), can this
formation still be pressed toward a deep multidimensional pluralism?
MY SIXTH AND FINAL QUESTION GOES LIKE THIS: NATION,
STATE, CAPITAL, SECULARISM?
Not a Secularist is as much concerned with nationalism as it is with secularism,
and it focuses on the constant political danger that a single constituency will
claim to embody and represent the nation. It argues that secularist discourse is
insufficient to hold such constituencies in check, and it suggests that an ethos
of multidimensional pluralism and egalitarianism might fare better against the
dangers of nationalism. Formations analyzes similar dynamics in the context of
recent European politics. Citing Jean Le Pen, rather than Bill Bennett, its analysis
of Muslims as a religious minority in Europe discloses the ways in which
European political discourses project universalism (e.g., through human rights)
while they more quietly populate the universal with particular types of people
(e.g., Frenchmen; see Asad 2003:159180). In line with Connollys long-standing
project of rearticulating political pluralism, both books focus on the possibility
of fostering a democratic ethos that is not premised on a homogenous nation,
nor dependent on securing the state as the key site of citizens allegiance, nor
committed to a renewed secularization of the world. And while both texts remain
guarded about the likelihood of establishing such an ethos, they argue for its political
necessity.
One of the points at which these texts differ is in their assessment of the power
and durability of modern secularism. In short, Formations attributes enormous power
to secularism, while Not a Secularist suggests that it is faltering. To return to my
first question, part of this variance may be definitional, but part of it is related

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to the different connections traced between secularism, nationalism, capitalism,

and the state. Both texts do extraordinary work in mapping these connections;
rather than rehearsing their arguments, however, Id like to conclude with the
following questions: What are the most salient connections among secularism, global
capital, nationalism, and the state today? Is it any more or less possible now to articulate
the relations between secularism and these other key world-shaping forces than it was when
these books were written? Is it important to trace them differently today? To contest the forms
of violence and injustice particular to modern secularism, is it necessary to place secularism
in connection with these other formations? How might we think about the challenges and
possibilities of doing so?
ABSTRACT
This essay sets the contemporary problematic of secularism in a critical frame by posing
six key questions: Why is it so difficultperhaps impossibleto reach a scholarly, much
less political, consensus on the significance of secularism? What are the implications of
mounting pressures within Euro-American discourses to tie secularism ever more closely
to Christianity? Insofar as secularism is historically constituted through (a contentious
and incomplete) exclusion of religion, can the contours of this contested formation be
traced more clearly by drawing on an archive of theological figures, such as that of
conversion? If secularism cannot be understood as simply coextensive with modernity,
what are the limits of the secular? To what extent does political pluralism presuppose
and depend on some notion or formation of the secular? And finally, within the shifting
patterns of our world today, what are the most salient connections among secularism,
nation, state, and capital? [secular, secularism, Christianity, conversion]
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2003

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Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Connolly, William E
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Habermas, Jurgen
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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
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Kant, Immanuel
1999 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Scherer, Matthew
2006 Saint John: The Miracle of Secular Reason. In Political Theologies: Public
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