Academic

Taylor on Secularism

By Lawrence Solum

Charles Taylor has posted How to Define Secularism on the Internet. Here is a taste:

Everyone agrees today that modern, diverse democracies have to be ?secular?, in some sense of this term. But what sense? The term (along with the corresponding French term ?laïcité?, and its derivatives) has more than one sense. There are in fact many different meanings, but I believe that we can get to a crucial issue if we single out two key conceptions.

On one view (A), secularism is mainly concerned with controlling religion. Its task is to define the place of religion in public life, and to keep it firmly in this location. This doesn?t need to involve strife or repression, provided various religious actors understand and respect these limits. But the various rules and measures which make up the secularist (or laïque) régime all have this basic purpose.

On the other view (B), the main point of a secularist régime is to manage the religious and metaphysical? philosophical diversity of views (including non?and anti?religious views)1 fairly and democratically. Of course, this task will include setting certain limits to religiously?motivated action in the public sphere, but it will also involve similar limits on those espousing non? or anti?religious philosophies. (For instance, the degree to which either can discriminate in certain relations, like hiring). For B, religion is not the prime focus of secularism.

The case I would like to make here is that B is much superior to A, at least for our time. The popularity of A is to be explained by certain Western histories of struggle in which secularist régimes came to be. But our present predicament is for the most part rather different than the one which generated these conflicts. It is above all, one of growing diversity in all Western democracies. For these reasons, B is more appropriate.

Highly recommended.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on October 29, 2010 (boomark / email).