End of Secular City Limits? On Law’s Religious Neutrality in the City

Abstract

What is the relationship between law and religion in the modern Western secular city? Has religion been effectively subdued by secularization, its effects limited by law? Is the law neutral in its regard and treatment of religion? Does law have any limits in this regard? How does it go about formulating the limits of the city itself, in this context? Though it would seem that historical projects of secularization intended to employ strategies to drive the religious into the private realm, separating it from responsibilities deemed to belong to secular state apparatuses, I argue that these projects were never able to reach an absolute point or state of finalization. A deeper investigation of this “incompleteness” can offer a kind of analytical key to understanding why it is that conflicts between the secular and the religious persist. There is another somehow parallel incompleteness to cities themselves if we approach them from a semiotic-spatial point of view that I think strongly informs these issues. Following modern philosophers, phenomenologists and geographers in their studies of space, I take the view that space is not an entity “out there,” existing a priori, but rather a social, sensorial and ultimately semiotic construction. Like secularization itself, then, the secular city is not (and cannot be) a “completed” entity but is rather a never-ceasing series of creations, disruptions and destructions. Understanding the religious in the secular city requires unbundling or unmasking its apparent material evidence to see how it is lived, and how it too creates, disrupts, destructs and resurges, eventually. The law of the secular city must engage the secular and the religious even as they fail to keep still. It may, however, have a strategic advantage in its own mutability, in the power of its semantic flexibility. The essay will attempt to show how the very mobility and changeability of law and its objects, once acknowledged, or brought to light, can empower processes of discomposition that trigger categorical shifts resulting in new outcomes to conflicts. In this way, the spatial limits of law could perhaps transform into unlimited possibilities for the agency of “secular” citizens.