The post-secular in post-war American religious history

Abstract

Like other post-constructions, the term ‘post-secular’ has expressed a number of different concepts that reinforce and interrogate one another to varying degrees. Foremost among these have been (1) the idea that a distinct era of secularity has come to an end, (2) the claim that secularity was always a fiction and observers now see through it, and (3) the theory that the religious and the secular are deeply intertwined. One can find early iterations of these views in the American context during the late 1950s and 1960s, especially among neo-orthodox and existentialist thinkers who charged that theological liberalism had capitulated to the forces of science and modern culture and within a younger generation of religious scholars – Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike – who deplored the loss of community in a liberal age. Only recently has the term been widely used by commentators on religion’s public roles. The rise of a sharp normative critique of secularity over the past twenty years has led thinkers as varied as Peter Berger, Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor to argue that modern societies have passed beyond a phase in which public institutions steadily marginalized religion and scholars declared it dead or dying. Yet the term ‘post-secular’ also retains its other meanings, signalling divergent visions of the present and the future that emerge from competing understandings of secularism as either a boon or a disaster.