Abstract
Moralized secularism is the view that “secularism” is defined in relation to certain moral values. Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor’s “liberal pluralism” is an influential version of moralized secularism, for it states that freedom of conscience and equal respect are the fundamental moral values of secularism. I present the objection that secularism is a redundant category because it carries no distinctive normative content that cannot be found in the more general, and less divisive, terminology of liberalism and democracy. In order to avoid this objection, I argue for conceiving secularism in a nonmoralized way. According to my view, secularism refers solely to the institutional arrangements that a state can put in place in order to address conflicts with organized religion(s) that might emerge at the moment of advancing its ideological political project (e.g., liberalism, republicanism). Through this interpretation, it is possible to conceptualize expressions of secularism that are either not liberal (i.e., republican) or not motivated by the acknowledgment of new forms of pluralism as being the prime challenge a state faces for advancing its political project (i.e., anticlerical). As the redundancy objection shows, this is a possibility that moralized accounts of secularism preclude.
Highlights
These criticisms gain relevance if we take into consideration that restrictions to religious freedoms of minorities are often justified by appeals to secularism and its alleged requirements—for instance, the requirement of separation of church and state
Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor have defined secularism in terms that are focused on protecting freedom of conscience and equal respect, which they portray as secularism’s moral ends, while neutrality of the state and separation of church and state are presented as its institutional means
By advancing the redundancy objection, I showed that these conceptions do not enrich our political vocabulary in a way that is normatively relevant and reinforce the skeptics’ view that we should abandon them altogether
Summary
Critics of secularism usually maintain that it is inherently antireligious, or that it is necessarily biased against religion. These criticisms gain relevance if we take into consideration that restrictions to religious freedoms of minorities are often justified by appeals to secularism and its alleged requirements—for instance, the requirement of separation of church and state. Facing these criticisms, Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor have defined secularism in terms that are focused on protecting freedom of conscience and equal respect, which they portray as secularism’s moral ends, while neutrality of the state and separation of church and state are presented as its institutional means. Maclure and Taylor’s strategy is elucidatory in this respect, for their distinction between the ends and the means of secularism serves to tame initiatives that intend to restrict freedom of religion in the name of neutrality of the state or separation of church and state, neither of which is intrinsically desirable This definition, is vulnerable of another kind of criticism, which maintains that the term “secularism” should be expunged from our political vocabulary. In addition to providing an argument against the redundancy objection upon which the farewell to secularism view relies, conceiving of secularism in nonmoralized terms has a further advantage It allows identifying as genuine conceptions of secularism institutional arrangements that are not set up for advancing the moral and political projects that characterize contemporary Western liberal democracies. Liberal values and the acknowledgement of pluralization of societies have not always inspired the institutions of secularism, it must be possible to conceive of forms of secularism that represent such non liberal and non pluralist motivations
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