Towards a Political Theory of Secularism

Abstract

Secularism has increasingly been the object of careful scrutiny in political philosophy and political theory in recent years. This is easily understandable. Political philosophy often responds to the urgencies and dilemmas of political life. From India to Canada through Europe, the relationship between political power and religion and the challenges raised by the fact of religious diversity have been at the forefront of public discussions for several years now. Very few still hold on to the “secularization thesis” according to which modernization was necessarily correlated with the decline of religion. One of the productive outcomes for the political philosophy of this renewed attention is the apparition of a growing number of competing for conceptual and normative theories of secularism. Charles Taylor and I sketched out one of these theories in a recent book, titled Secularism and Freedom of Conscience. This book was itself the outgrowth of our involvement in the 2007-2008 Public Commission on the accommodation of cultural and religious diversity put together by the Quebec government. In this chapter, I wish to outline and further develop some aspects of our theory and initiate a dialogue with alternative conceptions. I will first seek to lay out the conceptual architecture of a political theory of secularism. I will argue that we need to move from a monistic to a pluralist conception of political secularism, and also that the moral ends of the secular state need to be distinguished from its institutional means. Finally, I will contrast political secularism as I understand it with the “moderate” conception of secularism defended by Tariq Modood and others.