secularism - varieties of secularism in a secular age Flashcards

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1
Q

what is Taylor’s main argument

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o ‘Taylor’s book is more accurately seen as a brief against the idea that we have entered a ‘post-secular’ age’ (6)
o ‘belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives. And this will also likely mean that at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith’ (SA, 3)

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2
Q

3 types of secularity - Taylor

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♣ secularity
• retreat from religion in various spheres e.g. politics
♣ secularity 2
• more personal
• declining religious belief
o secularity 3 = where religion becomes an option amongst others. Not simply unchallenged anymore
♣ ‘secularity in this sense is a matter of the whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place’ (SA, 3)

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3
Q

Taylor - wants to change the way we think about religion

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♣ evokes subjective experience = ‘fullness’
♣ the world full of beauty and meaning
♣ it is a subjective experience understood objectively
♣ fullness is harder to achieve but can be achieved in interesting ways

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4
Q

Taylor - immanent frame

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♣ immanent frame = not a set of beliefs but rather rooted in context
♣ reworks weber’s ‘disenchantment’
♣ disenchantment does not mean the end of religion
♣ there is an aspiration to transcendence

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5
Q

Taylor - history of secularism

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o west = shaped by idea of natural order, divine creation etc.
o late 17th – 18th cent
♣ spread of providential deism
♣ exclusive humanism
♣ secular perspective
o transcendent can be grasped in other religions
o views secularity as a ‘product of the long history of reform movements within Western Christianity’ (15)

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6
Q

Taylor - history of reform and purity

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o reform originally was to produce purity – cleansing. Development of impersonal natural order
o ‘the possibility of a fully secular society is an unanticipated result of reformers’ efforts to police the properly spiritual’ (16)
o ‘A Secular Age displaces the commonsense opposition between the religious and the secular with a new understanding in which this opposition appears only as a late and retrospective misrecognition’ (17)

o Secularism introduced idea that spirit was radically other. Xianity is trying to separate itself from the flesh
o Sceptical about labels e.g. postmodern

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7
Q

Taylor criticism of subtraction theories

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o Criticises subtraction stories – ‘secular societies are not just mankind minus the religion’ (24-5)
♣ Secularisation is a ‘cumulatively and dialectically achieved condition, and one of its dimensions is the manifestation of religion as an option axis of mobilisation and belief’ (25)
♣ Shares same view as Asad that the secular is a ‘set of conditions in which modern ideas of religion are constructed’ (25)
♣ Emphasis on genealogy of society

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8
Q

2, milbank - view of Taylor

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  • If Taylor’s thesis ‘is that secularisation is finally attributable to the self-undoing of Latin Christendom thorugh over obessession with ‘reform’, then this is also a thesis whose very succinctness paradoxically allows for no very clear identification of heroes and villains’ (54)
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9
Q

2, milbank - Taylor non-sociological approach

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  • Taylor does not look at secularism sociologically – it is not inevitable
    o Does not conform with Durkheim (idea that religion fulfils social solidarity) or Weber (idea that religion vanishes in the face of rationalised) or reformed Weberian ideas that religion has ‘simply mutated to a more private and expressivist form’ (55)

o Recovery of xian themes vs. rejection of Enlightenment rationality
o Does not deny secularisation altogether but recognises that religion can change
‘secularisation is a reality, but it is merely an event or a series of events, no an inexorable human destiny’ (56) not a necessary, subtractive process

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10
Q

2, milbank - there are aspects of old favouring of religious belief that have been removed

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o belief in experience of ‘acts of God’
o view that religion and politics cannot be separated
o belief that the world is full of magic – enchanted universe
- crucial factor = ‘the favouring of discipline over festivity and the abstract considerations of both life and death over relational embodiment’ (61)

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11
Q

2, milbank - Taylor on disenchantment

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  • significant emphasis of Taylor is idea that disappearance of enchantment does not have to mean decline of religion
    o e.g. Wahabism – removed etherialism from Islam
    o however, Taylor recognises that ‘such phenomena in the end encourage secularisation’ (62)
  • in the end, he argues that disenchantment is linked to secularisation
  • religion combines strange paradox of moral order and ‘wild Dionysiac energies…often linked with sex and violence’ (63)
    o link between religion and ethics
    o ‘religion…begins in the mystical but ends up by engendering some sort of ethical practice’ (64)
    o in focusing on love etc. religion has delivered the mix message of sex/desire etc.
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12
Q

4, during - why secularism has occurred

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  • Secularism has resulted ‘because over centuries, Latin Christianity, through its many internal reformist movements, became committed to the Aristotelian project of general human flourishing. During the Enlightenment, central elements of the Christian faith were transformed into a humanism whose ethical and conceptual framework and purposes were fundamentally immanent’ (106)
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13
Q

4, during - how might the secularist feel re. Taylor

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  • ‘if Taylor believes that the secular world has lost a fullness available only through the transcendent, the secularist may feel an equivalent emptiness in Taylor’s own analysis, since its attempts to explain how history happened… are so abstracted and distanced from the events to which they ultimately refer’ (109)
  • ‘what about those who neither feel the spiritual emptiness of modernity nor embrace secular reformism’s promise?’ (113)
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14
Q

4, during - assumptions in Taylor work

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  • assumptions in Taylor’s work
    o richness requires the transcendent
    o disposition towards richness is integral to moral anthropology
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15
Q

6, bilgrami - 2 main parts of Taylor’s work

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o ‘we have come not just to have secular doctrinal commitments and secular political arrangements… but to live in a secular age, by which is meant that we live in an age that possesses the conceptual preconditions that make possible such changes in doctrine… by making merely optional the belief in God and religion and its relevance to public life’
o these conditions did not come about through mere subtraction, but rather through ‘philosophical construction of a new set of interconnected ideas about the nature of the human subject and agency’ (145)

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16
Q

9, Sheehan - when was reform

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o ‘before the early modern, there was something like ‘enchantment’. After came something like the ‘secular’’ (219)
o Xianity was previously a ‘tool for the production of… extrafamilial kinship structures’ (221)
o Religion and society was heavily linked
o Deadly sins = personal failings e.g. anger
o ‘denial of the Eucharist was both a civil and a religious punishment’ (221)
o between this and today = disenchantment
o ‘reform pushed Christianity away from corporeal practices to mental states, to doctrinal propositions to which one can assent or not’ (222)
o church lost its position in society
o people became more reflective with regards to their belief

17
Q

9, Sheehan - what was religion for Taylor

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o For Taylor, religion = in place of ‘fullness’, where individuals orient themselves spiritually
o ‘religion… should be a historically contingent fact… but since all of these attributes are characterised by their relation not to a real past but to one imaginatively figured as a scene of loss, the historicity of religion… is difficult to pin down’ (229)

18
Q

10, göle - colonialism

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  • links the ‘civilising missions of the secular’ to colonialism
    o ‘limiting the narration of secularity to Latin Christendom dismisses the civilizational powers of Western modernity, which are inseparable from sexual and spatial politics’ (244)
    o by bringing Islam into study of secularism, we can criticise the ‘universalistic underpinnings of the secular’ (245)
    o should not read relationship between Islam and the secular externally but rathe close up – perspective turned towards Islam
19
Q

10, göle - france/turkey general and history

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o presence of Muslims in Europe leads secularisation and Islam to be intertwined e.g. headscarf debate = inter-civilisation debate or the debate about the army in secular politics in Turkey. Turkey = majority Muslim, France = Muslim-migrant
o history:
♣ turkey – ‘transition from the multi-ethnic and the multireligious Ottoman Empire to a Turkish Sunni majority’. Sense of ethnic cleansing (247)
♣ france – impact of colonial past in the relationship between france and Muslim migrants
♣ france and turkey state secularisms can be compared

20
Q

10, göle - Turkish gender laiklik

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o Secularism as part of a civilising mission
o Secularism = gendered
o In the Ottoman period, they favoured female education etc. against traditional ideas of polygamy etc.
o The republic creates secular spaces e.g. opera houses
o People held hands/men and women shook ands
o ‘the modern secular life becomes a sign of prestige through its performative everyday practices, pictorial representations and material culture’ (255)
o emergence of islam in 1980s = threatening to hegemonic control of secular
o people wanted to wear headscarves
o ‘the Turkish and French headscarf debates, in spite of their differences, have some commonalities to the extent that in both cases gender equality and secular spaces framed the debate’ (255)
o ban = desire of state to control public spaces
o veil transformed from religious to power symbol

21
Q

10 - gole, france and turkey and gender and durkheim

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  • ‘in both France and Turkey, cultural confrontations and emotional tensions between secular and religious groups are unfolding in the realm of actions of everyday life…for the secular and for the religious…gendered performances and spatial divisions became the battleground for self-distinction and discipline’ (259)
  • ‘one can suggest that European Islam is following similar dynamics to what Charles Taylor calls the post-Durkheimian situation, in which faith is not connected, or is only weakly connected, to a national political identity’ (264)
22
Q

12, mahmood on taylor

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o normative thrust of Taylor’s account of secularism in Euro-Atlantic Christian societies
♣ privileges belief
♣ modernity has caused shift from religious practice to propositional belief, individual
♣ ‘what does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that in some sense we do: I mean the ‘we’ who live in the West’ (SA 1)
♣ however, important to look at Xianity’s relationship with others
♣ linked to colonialism
• in colonial India, Bibles were banished from Indian schools, replaced with English lit (Matthew Arnold)
• this set standard for British secular education
♣ however, Taylor is not colonial despite emphasising secularisation of West

23
Q

Taylor, how did secularism come about

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o Division between natural and supernatural
o There had to be a possibility of living without the supernatural

  • with secularism, ‘the modern theory of moral order gradually infiltrated and transformed the social imaginary’ (312)
    o social imaginary = collective understanding