Secular Bias Research Articles

Renegotiating the Islam and Development-Nexus in Indonesia: Fikih Peradaban as a Middle Ground between Local and Global Development Paradigms

I n 2015, the United Nations introduced the that aims at globally achieving concrete Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Today, sustainable development has become the dominant development narrative in 2030 Agenda, a new development paradigm international cooperation discourse, despite criticism of its top-down approach and secular bias. This explorative article discusses the potential of Indonesian Islamic concepts, such as Nahdlatul Ulama’s Islam Nusantara and Fikih Peradaban, to contribute to the sustainable development discourse from an Islamic perspective. By mapping the current intellectual debate on Fikih Peradaban, I demonstrate that Fikih Peradaban is a particularly suited approach as epistemologically and conceptually it occupies a middle ground position that mediates between local and global development paradigms. I further argue that Fikih Peradaban’s focus on the concepts of humanism, humanist Islam (or Islamic humanism), and Islamic legal reasoning in the service of all people regardless of religious affiliation may contribute to its global appeal and effectiveness. The article draws on notes taken at a conference on “Islam Nusantara and World Peace” (February 5, 2023) in Surabaya as well as notes taken at the first Fikih Peradaban conference (February 6, 2023) in Surabaya. It is also based on a close reading of official material that accompanied the latter conference. Furthermore, I embed the discussion on the nexus between Indonesian Islamic concepts and sustainable development into the broader academic and policy debate on the role of religion within sustainable development. Hence, this article is connected to the research project “Freedom and Development? Religious Actors, Freedom of Religion and Belief, and Sustainable Development” conducted by the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, Hamburg, from 2020 to 2023.
 Keywords: Indonesia, Fikih Peradaban, humanist Islam, sustainable development

Balancing hope at the end of life organisational conditions for spiritual care in palliative homecare in Sweden

The aim of this article is to examine how norms and values related to culture, religion, and spirituality were experienced and expressed by healthcare professionals caring for patients at the end of life in Advanced Care at Home (ACH) in Sweden, with a focus on how organisational aspects enabled or hindered spiritual care. Founded on participant observation with physicians and exploratory short-term fieldwork conducted between June and December 2019, findings show that physicians experienced communication problems relating to both religion and culture, yet were skilled in balancing hope and existential needs, medically and practically. However, all healthcare encompassed a secular bias complicating abilities to “read” religious and spiritual needs, reflecting a general lack of religious literacy among healthcare providers. ACH physicians and the palliative care team were facilitated by several organisational and structural conditions necessary for person-centred and spiritual care, including the non-hierarchical and interprofessional composition of care teams, continuity of care, space for physicians' reflection, and engagement in dialogue with patients and their relatives. Furthermore, the 6S palliative care ideology was promoted within the team, as was a creative outlook in supporting patients and their relatives' hope at the end of life. Nevertheless, interest varied. Some physicians were more skilled in dialogue, creativity and including the patient in medical decisions. Others were less focused on the person and maintained a strong emphasis on medicine, practicalities, and biomedical testing. Further, structural and organisational hindrances to person-centred and spiritual care were illuminated, including a lack of routines surrounding protecting the patient's needs in transitions from hospital to ACH. Even though the organisation of care in ACH provided conditions for person-centredness, the lack of religious literacy caused further hindrances to spiritual care. We conclude that, without religious literacy, and the ability to holistically meet patients' spiritual needs, care cannot be truly person-centred.

How Religious Are “Religious” Conflicts?

Abstract Despite significant advances in our understanding of the politics of religious ideology and identity across time and space, scholars disagree on how to conceptualize “religious” conflicts and “religious” actors, and how to infer religious motivations from actors’ behavior. This Forum brings together scholars with diverse research agendas to weigh in on conceptual, methodological, and ethical questions surrounding the study of contemporary religious conflicts. We ask: How do we know when individuals and groups are acting on religious, as opposed to other, motivations? To what extent can analysts rely on actors’ own claims about their motivations? How does the “secular bias” affect scholarly research on religion and conflict? Is there a bias over which conflicts and actors come to be labeled and coded as “religious” by scholars, policymakers, and the media? The Forum fosters a debate aimed at identifying gaps within and between academic research and policy as well as media analyses on religion and political violence. The contributors examine contradictory conclusions by academics and policy analysts rooted in diverging assumptions and arguments about “religious” actors, “religious” motivations, and “religious” conflicts. The Forum proposes some ways for scholars to overcome these challenges as well as offers implications for policymakers and journalists who shape the public discourse.

Climate Politics and the Power of Religion, edited by EVAN BERRY

Is religion an overlooked resource in the quest to overcome international gridlock on climate change? Or is its power exaggerated, doomed to fizzle once lofty ideals meet real life? These two questions once served as the intellectual centers of gravity in discussions of religions and climate change. Evan Berry’s edited volume Climate Politics and the Power of Religion marks a welcome new phase of scholarship, one that shifts our attention from questions about the potential of religion writ large to questions about specific religions, at specific times, scales, and places. A companion volume to Understanding Climate Change Through Religious Lifeworlds (edited by David Haberman, 2021), Climate Politics and the Power of Religion aims to address three gaps in the existing literature: the paucity of literature on religions outside the richer countries of the global north (especially Christianity); a secular bias in the social scientific literature on climate change; and inadequate attention to politics in the religion and environment literature (3). To accomplish this, the volume assembles scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, with a heavy emphasis on anthropology—a natural outcome of the project’s stated aim of emphasizing ethnographic scholarship (vii). The chapters of Part I analyze the role of religious actors and ideas in national-level climate policy discussions, via case studies in the Philippines, Trinidad, and India. The chapters in Part II articulate theoretical concerns about the treatment of religion in climate research. Part III investigates “novel and emerging modes of religious engagement with climate politics” (7) in India, Peru, and Puerto Rico. Crosscutting these divisions are three broad questions, the answers to which are assessed in the final chapter: how are religious actors shaping national and transnational climate disputes, how are religious norms shaping the understanding and experience of climate change on the ground, and finally, how is climate change changing religions.

Foreword

Foreword Tamara Sonn (bio) The articles in this issue of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs focus on civil society discourse and its implications for international affairs. The academic field of International Relations, reflecting its modernist origins, is state-centered; it focuses primarily on relations between political and military entities, with economic interests always a central focus and non-governmental institutions at the margins. Civil society discourse—whether expressed through the arts, religious, or secular organizations—have yet to find a place in the standard IR curriculum, leaving students ill-equipped to recognize social discontent and its potential political impacts. Clear examples of the analytic weakness of the traditional approach can be seen in the failure of the foreign policy establishment to recognize the long-standing social grievances that resulted in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union, and the 2010–11 Arab Spring. These weaknesses have been noticed. CIA Director Stansfield Turner wrote in 1991 of the failure to foresee that the United States would have to intervene militarily in Iran, Libya, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon and Kuwait during the previous decade.1 Regarding the Arab democracy uprisings, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in 2011, "We're facing an Arab awakening that nobody could have imagined and few predicted just a few years ago."2 Michael Walzer reflects on the secular bias of IR and therefore incomprehension of the rise of political Islam in his 2015 The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions. Yet portents of these and many other developments over the past century were clearly evident in the discourse of religious and other civil society actors and in the works of poets, fiction writers, playwrights, and musicians. Students trained to analyze the popular sentiments expressed in these discourses could contribute to more comprehensive intelligence gathering. They might even recognize that traditional foreign policy strategies actually contribute to destabilizing social unrest. For example, according to emeritus Georgetown Professor of Government and International Affairs Robert Lieber, "maintaining a secure supply of oil from the Middle East and the Persian Gulf" is essential to our national interest—even if it means compromising our commitment to democracy.3 Georgetown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy Dennis Ross recently argued in support of strengthening U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia despite the state-sanctioned murder of journalist Jamal [End Page 145] Khashoggi "and other human rights violations." In order to secure the free flow of "Saudi oil," we need to "do what we have always done:… balance values and interests."4 This approach is what drove the United States to participate in the overthrow of Iran's developing democracy in 1953, contributing to the anti-Americanism that drove the 1979 revolution and remains a potent threat today. Given the vested interests, it is unlikely that U.S. foreign policy training will change significantly in the near term. But the articles in this volume provide good examples of the kinds of analyses that would help inform more comprehensive understandings of international affairs. They include studies of the manipulation of religious conservatism by rightwing politicians in Brazil, and the political exploitation of disaffected young males radicalized online in South Korea; and the weaknesses (and, by implication, inconsistencies) of economic sanctions as a foreign policy tool in China; and the potential strengths of civil society activism in Yemen. Other articles deal with national issues that have important transnational resonances, such as the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on indigenous communities in Latin America. Tamara Sonn Tamara Sonn is Professor Emerita at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Her most recent books include Islam and Democracy After the Arab Spring (with John L. Esposito and John O. Voll; Oxford, 2016), Islam: History, Religion, and Politics (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), and Is Islam an Enemy of the West? (Polity, 2016). She has published over one hundred chapters and articles, and her works have been translated into Arabic, Bengali, German, Portuguese, Korean, and Russian. She has lectured in North America, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and the U.S. Department of State...

The Postsecular Turn: Interrogating Postcolonialism after 9/11

Due to its complete reliance on western secular tradition, postcolonial theory has been accused of secular bias manifested in its negligence of spiritual and religious epistemologies. Having its methodological roots in forms of the secular – liberal humanism, Marxism, the western university – postcolonialism has largely ignored a spiritual dimension. Put differently, inspired and influenced by western ideologies such as Marxism, nationalism, postmodernism and secular humanism, as well as Edward Said’s concepts of secular criticism and the secular intellectual, postcolonialism has downplayed and rejected religion as a subject of concern in favour of secular thought, defining its intellectual and political project in opposition to the term “sacred”. However, owing to the global return of religion from “exile” (especially after the 9/11 attacks), postcolonial critics and theorists have started to engage with the question of religion and spirituality. They have recognized the significance of the religious and the spiritual as modes of postcolonial intervention. This essay attempts to highlight the postsecular turn within the field of postcolonial studies. My argument is that due to the contributions of non-western postcolonialists and their acknowledgement of religion as a postcolonial category of analysis, postcolonialism has become postsecular, furnishing a room for both the religious and the secular so that they may enter into an academic critical dialogue. This gradual process of change from a secular postcolonialism to a postsecular postcolonialism is reflected in postcolonial writers’ inclusion of spiritual and religious matters in their literary and theoretical narratives.

(Re)thinking Religious Studies

AbstractThe world religions paradigm (WRP), often regarded as hegemonic in research and education in religious studies, has long been criticized for being modeled on predominantly Protestant, Christian, and Western ideas about religion, and thus running the risk of reductionism and of a failure to recognize expressions of religion that do not fit this framework. Despite this, it is difficult to get rid of the prevailing WRP, especially in education. In addition, nonconfessional, nonreligious, secular education in religion may be biased by norms and values that assume that religion as such is outdated and irrational. The seemingly neutral, nonreligious, or agnostic position that is present in religious studies at the higher education level can then be seen as aligned with an institutional, not necessarily personal, secular bias that rules out religion from the very outset. Consequently, higher level education about religion runs the risk of presenting religion in terms of flawed stereotypes. In this article, Daniel Enstedt addresses these two interrelated and subject‐specific problems by examining them through the lens of Gert J. J. Biesta's educational philosophy, and in particular in relation to his discussion about the three domains of education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification.

Liturgical literacy as hidden capital

This article focuses on a form of supplementary Islamic education that centres on Qur’an studies and examines the reported experiences of Muslim students that regularly shift between this and their mainstream secular school. Its aim is to better comprehend the dialectical interplay between this type of supplementary education and mainstream secular schooling. Within this framework, the article explores how the traditional way of reading, reciting, and memorizing the Qur’an might relate to the type of teaching and learning that occurs within mainstream public schools. It also explores the possibility of a secular bias within the Swedish school system, the contribution of Qur’an studies to mainstream schooling (and vice versa), Qur’an-based vs. mainstream notions of “reading”, especially in relation to the idea of “understanding” and “meaning”, and how competency in Qur’an recitation becomes valuable secular “capital” when translated from language of “liturgical literacy” to the language of “skills”. To balance and enhance our understanding of student experiences, this article employs a constructive understanding of Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus as well as Andrey Rosowsky’s notion of liturgical literacy.

Abstract P4-09-06: Analyzing the changes in the HR+/HER2- metastatic breast cancer (mBC) landscape since the arrival of CDK4/6 inhibitors with machine learning and visual analytics

Abstract BACKGROUND: The real-world impact of CDK4/6 inhibitor use on HR+/HER2- mBC treatment sequencing, treatment response, and therapeutic utilization is limited. This study sought to describe treatment sequencing and response pre- and post-FDA approval of CDK4/6 inhibitors by conducting a traditional observational study approach and supplementing with a machine-learning methodology. METHODS: Female patients ≥18yrs were identified in the MarketScan Commercial and Medicare Supplement databases with continuous enrollment for at least 12 months pre-index, ≥2 medical claims for a BC diagnosis and ≥2 medical claims for metastatic disease (earliest=index date), and who had no treatment at any time with HER2 targeted therapy. Patients were excluded if they had received CDK4/6 or everolimus treatment prior to index. Treatment was stratified by line of therapy pre- and post- first CDK4/6 approval (February 3, 2015). We identified treatment patterns with standard distributions and visual analytics. Response to therapy and utilization was analyzed with prediction models and IBM Watson® machine learning population comparison models. RESULTS: A total of 19,558 patients were eligible for the study with a mean age at diagnosis of mBC of 62 (SD 13). Prior to first CDK4/6 inhibitor approval, anastrazole and letrozole monotherapies were most likely to be identified as both first and second line treatment. Following approval of the first CDK4/6 inhibitor in 2015, CDK4/6 inhibitors were observed as a first line treatment in 25% of patients, and as second line treatment in 24% of patients. Of patients diagnosed following the first CDK4/6 inhibitor approval, 44% of patients were exposed to endocrine therapy and 10% were exposed to chemotherapy in the pre-index period. Patients receiving CDK4/6 inhibitors in combination with endocrine therapy as first line treatment were observed to have a longer progression free survival time than patients receiving endocrine monotherapy. Visual analytics demonstrate a large variation in treatment sequencing, especially after first line therapy. Machine learning and prediction models identified a strong secular bias in the use of CDK4/6 and a signal for improved treatment response in patients with no exposure to endocrine therapies in the pre-index period. CONCLUSIONS: The mBC treatment landscape has changed significantly with the introduction of CDK4/6 inhibitors, which may be expected to impact long-term outcomes. Visual analytics and machine learning approaches can improve clinical insight. These approaches can help with identifying patient and clinical characteristics that predict response and utilization as well as appropriate treatment selections across lines of therapy. Citation Format: Meade D, Hensley Alford S, Mahatma S, Malangone-Monaco E, Boulanger L, Tkacz J, Turner SJ, Chen S, Manson S, Mejia S, Buleje I, Madan P, Kim G, Fowler R, Basar A. Analyzing the changes in the HR+/HER2- metastatic breast cancer (mBC) landscape since the arrival of CDK4/6 inhibitors with machine learning and visual analytics [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2018 Dec 4-8; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P4-09-06.

Furthering Pluralism? The German Foundations in Transitional Tunisia

This article examines the widely held assumption that Germany’s political foundations pursue distinctively partisan approaches that promise to be advantageous with regard to the furtherance of pluralist civil societies abroad. It reviews this assumption through a qualitative analysis of their partnerships in transitional Tunisia, following a comparison between the German foundations and other Western agencies. It exposes a common secular bias in Western civil society support and qualifies the assumption that the partisan approaches lead easily to pluralist civil society support. While the foundations partner with rather diverse organizations, they still favor organizations that follow Western lines, and their civil society support practices display interest in the furtherance of both pluralism and democratic stability promising corporatism.

A Genuine Islamic Conceptualization of Religious Freedom

AbstractDeparting from a critical norm research perspective, the paper first sketches the need to unveil the Eurocentric and secular bias of International Relations (IR) as a discipline in general and its constructivist norm research program in particular. With regard to human rights norms, and religious freedom in particular, the dominant liberal-secular international human rights law understanding of religious freedom marginalizes religious, and especially, Islamic grounds and understandings of this truly global norm. Indeed, it demonstrates both, the dominant ideational perspective of religious freedom as a Western human right grounded by Western-canonical thinkers, and the limits of accommodating religion and religious voices in IR. In contrast, and against the background of a post-secular IR, the paper seeks to unveil alternative and marginalized bodies of Islamic knowledge for the sake of a more comprehensive picture to be painted by IR. By reconstructing reformist Islamic thought and Islamic ideational perspectives and conceptualizations of religious freedom, the paper seeks to let these voices speak for themselves as truly genuine Islamic contributions to IR. The overall aim is threefold: to theoretically connect critical norm research and post-secular approaches with reformist Islamic thought by conceptualizingijtihadas religious norm contestation; to unveil the double marginalized character of critical Muslim voices in IR; and finally to paint a broader and more comprehensive picture of Islam and IR by revealing an alternative Islamic genealogy of universal religious freedom.

Muslim Crusaders: Guzmán el Bueno and the Limits of Secular History

ABSTRACTAround 1280, a Christian mercenary captain led Muslim soldiers bearing crosses on their chests, in the fashion of crusaders, into battle against other Muslims. At least, this is what Pedro Barrantes Maldonado reported in his Ilustraciones de la casa de Niebla about the well-known nobleman, Don Alfonso Pérez de Guzmán, later called Guzmán el Bueno (Guzmán the Good) and the Muslim soldiers under his command in Morocco. Rather than simply dismissing this episode as fiction, as it has been in the past, this essay interrogates that impulse to dismiss, which it identifies with an enduring secular bias in the study of religious encounters in the medieval Mediterranean. Using Latin, Arabic and Romance sources, this essay places the history of Guzmán el Bueno in a broader context, arguing that moments such as that from Barrantes Maldonado point towards a more complex picture of religious interaction than imaginable in secular terms.

Challenging the Curious Erasure of Religion from the Study of Religious Terrorism

Abstract The role that religion plays in the motivation of “religious terrorism” is the subject of much ongoing dispute, even in the case of jihadist groups. Some scholars, for differing reasons, deny that it has any role; others acknowledge the religious character of jihadism in particular, but subtly discount the role of religion, while favoring other explanations for this form of terrorism. Extending an argument begun elsewhere (Dawson 2014, 2017), this article delineates and criticizes the influence of a normative religious bias, on the one hand, and a normative secular bias, on the other hand, on scholarship addressing the relationship between religiosity and terrorism. I examine two illustrative studies to demonstrate the complexity of the conceptual issues at stake: Karen Armstrong’s best-selling book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014) and a recent article by Bart Schuurman and John G. Horgan on the rationales for terrorist violence in homegrown jihadist groups (2016).

¿Empoderamiento y sumisión a Dios? La acción pía en las nuevas musulmanas del siglo XXI

Agency has constituted a key concept within feminist studies and activism. Building on Saba Mahmood’s suggestion, this article seeks to show the pious modality of action in several Spanish new Muslim women, on the one hand, and to assess the agency of these women who conceive their freedom in the act of submission to God from a feminist standpoint, on the other. I will hold that the liberal and secular biases that the concept of agency that hegemonic feminism has naturalized need to be deconstructed, and that agency needs to be acknowledged beyond the dichotomy of patriarchal reproduction via-a-vis resistance. I will thus outline the main epistemological as well as corporal features of the pious modality of action, in which the body functions as much more than a mere sign. The conclusion will suggest that even though the framework in which the pious gender discourses are produced is indeed patriarchal, these women’s agency has an empowering dimension that leads them to reject and negotiate certain premises and situations in which gender inequalities (may) take place.

A Religious Ethics of Translation: The Love Command

Our understanding of ethics in the field of translation studies shows a secular bias which has distorted our moral vision. This article examines recent accounts of the role of ethics when communication is translated by interpreters and translators. Rather than relying on professional codes or relativist approaches, the potential value in adopting a religious perspective to our understanding of ethics is underlined, reclaiming the spiritual dimension of moral action and reconceptualising notions of the Other, power and ideology in translation. Examples are given from the literature in the field of contemporary translation studies.

A morphospace of planktonic marine diatoms. II. Sampling standardization and spatial disparity partitioning

AbstractMorphospace occupation through time provides a view of diversification distinct from the more familiar taxonomic tabulations. However, this view is subject to the same geological biases long recognized in studies of taxonomic diversification, where techniques for correcting secular bias in sampling have become standard practice. In this study, we apply sampling standardization techniques to a morphospace investigation to test whether observed stratigraphic trends in morphospace occupation are artifacts of trends in sampling. When sampling bias is corrected by randomized subsampling, all disparity metrics show stationary patterns, or at most directional changes of small magnitude. Metrics describing the average dispersion of taxa in morphospace are less subject to sampling bias than those describing the total extent of morphospace occupied. We also investigate a measure of disparity that is insensitive to sampling intensity, introducing a geographic component of morphological disparity. By analogy to α and β components of taxonomic diversity, we suggest the notions of α and β disparity, and find that α disparity remains roughly constant through time. Our analysis also allows us to present the first taxonomic diversity curve of diatoms under shareholder quorum subsampling (SQS), showing similar results to previously published subsampling methods: a roughly twofold rise over the Cenozoic, with peak diversity around the Eocene/Oligocene boundary. Tests for methodological bias from choices in ordination method and data culling during morphospace construction indicate that our results are relatively insensitive to both factors: Cenozoic occupation of planktonic diatom morphospace is largely unchanging. We find a similarly stationary pattern when we directly analyze the morphological data, seeing no change in the prevalence of taxa with different sets of morphological characters. More broadly, our results make clear that a complete view of morphological disparity must consider sampling biases, which can be addressed with wellestablished, quantitative methods in morphospaces populated using occurrence-level data.

Two Sides of the Same Coin? The Muslim Umma and the European Union

This article examines the normative aspirations of the umma in international relations (IR). It is not the intention of this article to provide the blueprint of a ‘Muslim EU’, rather, in comparing the articulation of the European Union (EU) and the umma in IR, the article shows the way in which the EU represents a (limited) ‘European umma’, and charts the difficulties faced by both assemblies in being analysed in IR, by virtue of their shared transnational character. However, the Muslim umma assembly is shown to face more problems than its erstwhile EU counterpart due to the religious nature of the umma. The article charts the use of constructivism in IR to explain the creation of norms and identity in the international system, accounting for the EU's supranational presence in international politics. The application of constructivism to the umma, however, is shown to be more problematic due to the secular bias in IR and, perhaps more importantly, the Islamic resurgence being insufficiently concerned with the constitutive elements within it.

Leo Strauss and Anglo-American democracy: a conservative critique

Leo Strauss has been simultaneously condemned by the Left as an extreme opponent of liberal democracy and celebrated by the Right as a defender of Western civilization. Rejecting both of these portrayals, Grant N. Havers shifts the debate beyond the conventional parameters of our age. In Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy, Havers interprets Leo Strauss' political philosophy from a conservative standpoint, depicting Strauss as a Cold War liberal with a strong secular bias who believed Anglo-American democracy was the one true universal regime that could be embraced and practiced by all human beings regardless of time, place, or creed.

Teaching Religion in Public Schools: Review of Warren A. Nord, Does God Make A Difference?

AbstractIn this review of Warren Nord's Does God Make a Difference? Taking Religion Seriously in Our Schools and Universities, Walter Feinberg provides a detailed analysis of Nord's argument that the study of religion should be constitutionally mandated as a corrective to the overwhelmingly secular course of study offered in contemporary public schools and universities. Nord bases his claim on both constitutional and educational grounds. His constitutional argument is that, due to their secular bias, schools fail in their requirement to take a neutral stance toward religion; he contends that this creates a school environment hostile to religion that thus requires a legal remedy. Nord's primary educational argument is that religion courses are needed to counterbalance the secular bias dominant in public schools and universities. Feinberg delineates how Nord's constitutional argument fails and how his educational argument has serious flaws and contradictions. According to Feinberg, a stronger argument for mandating courses on religion in schools would be that because public schools exist in a religiously infused environment, it is important for students to be exposed to alternative understandings that promote reflection on and criticism of one's own beliefs, including religious beliefs. Feinberg concludes that if religion is to be taught in the public schools, it needs to be justified on civic rather than religious grounds.

A Response to Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation

A Response to Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation Alexandra Walsham (bio) Brad Gregory has written a brave and provocative book that is destined to stimulate debate for decades to come. Sweeping in scale and striking in its erudition, The Unintended Reformation is a longitudinal study of how the past has shaped the present. It is an absorbing and sophisticated investigation of the complex historical legacies of the religious revolution inaugurated by the Protestant reformers in 16th-century Europe. It centers on the paradox that a movement that was designed to renew and purify religious truth and to intensify spirituality had the unforeseen consequence of creating the increasingly secular societies in which we live today. In tracing the process by which religious faith and theology have gradually been marginalized from public life over the course of the last five centuries, it provides a fresh perspective on the enduringly relevant question of the origins of modernity, albeit one self-consciously indebted to previous work by the economist Albert Hirschman, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, and the historian of science Amos Funkenstein.1 Breaking out of conventional molds, The Unintended Reformation is a hybrid work of history, philosophy, and contemporary moral and political commentary. In tackling this topic Gregory has two underlying agendas. One is a determination to discredit what he calls "supersessionist" models of historical change: models predicated upon teleology and upon the assumption that the steady displacement of "medieval" by "modern" ideas, practices, and structures is a wholly positive development. He conceives of his book as an answer to calls for a history of the Reformation with the notion of "progress" left out (366) and as a counterpoint to triumphalist post-Enlightenment narratives that celebrate the emancipation of Western society from the grip of "ignorance" and "superstition" and approvingly chart the rise of liberal democracy. They tell a story Click for larger view View full resolution Hans Holbeins, The Preacher (1547). From George Edward Woodberry, A History of Wood-Engraving (New York, 1883). of incremental Weberian disenchantment and of the inexorable growth of post-Darwinian atheism. Following in the footsteps of Herbert Butterfield and others, Gregory recognizes the roots of this whiggish historical vision in the very eras under his examination and regards its tenacity as a reflection of its success as a form of "ideological imperialism" (386).2 Against the sense of inevitability that underpins such accounts, he is at pains to draw our attention to a set of more interesting long-term trajectories: the tangled "web of rejections, retentions and transformations" by which a traditional Christian culture was slowly transfigured into something quite different, and by which the efforts of Luther, Calvin, and their disciples to recapture the spirit of primitive Christianity and build a new Jerusalem led, inadvertently, to the emergence of a world in which God has, to a greater or lesser extent, become an irrelevance— a world that the reformers themselves would have abominated. Expanding a theme of his first book, Salvation at Stake, Gregory's second agenda is a robust critique of what he regards as reductionist theories of religion derived from the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology, and of postmodern social and cultural constructionism.3 The Unintended Reformation is a sharply edged rejection of interpretive tendencies that, implicitly if not explicitly, refuse to accept the reality of belief in absolute truths in the past and reduce them to mere symbols, categories, "languages," and "discourses." It repudiates such approaches as insufficient to the task of understanding and capturing historical realities. Indeed, it denounces them as evidence of a secular bias that is no less "confessional" than that which marks histories written by committed believers themselves.4 For Gregory, the intellectual trends that now dominate the academy are extensions of the very same processes that his book seeks to explain and illuminate. They are no less historically contingent and arbitrary than the faith convictions that secular academics denounce as inimical to the writing of "sound" history. Gregory's analysis here is incisive and penetrating, and it is certainly true that postmodernism has not been free of internal inconsistency. It has encouraged us to acknowledge the rationality of past belief systems, but it has not always...