‘Multiple Secularities: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age’ – Introduction

Abstract

Many of the key features of the contemporary era of global modernity bear powerful connections to religion and secularity. Worldwide migration brings with it the movement of religious identities and practices. Emergent forms of religious diversity challenge societies, especially those who have been marked by close connections between state, national identity and organized religion. More than before, migratory movements and questions regarding the rights of ‘newcomers’ are today at the centre of struggles over citizenship and maintain intimate links to struggles over the expansion of native residents’ citizenship rights as in the case of gay and lesbian mobilizations. In this context, the question of whether the religious tradition migrants belong to, and which presumably shapes migrants’ ethics, conforms to the values of host societies has drawn great attention in public debate. The demands of religious minorities to freely and equitably practice their religion and the practices of states to accommodate them are assessed in light of the values of democracy and human rights, and states, religious communities as well as ‘secular’ movements usually claim these values for themselves when justifying their lines of action in front of increasingly globalized audiences. Likewise, terrorism just as the so-called ‘war on terror’ responding to it and the forms of religious profiling of victims and potential suspects they engender, are fuelling contestations over religion and secularity. This suggests that secularity is often implied in social conflicts or processes of change that have other issues as their primary object. At the same time, however, the way secularity figures within configurations of modernity is fundamentally shaped by the long duree of civilizational history, by the way religion affects local cosmologies and