Secularism as Anti-Divisiveness

The notion of secularism is contested – in terms of its very meaning, as well as politically. Cécile Laborde (Liberalism’s Religion, Harvard University Press 2017) suggests that this can be explained if one recognizes that secularism is really a complex notion that involves, on the one hand, several different normative concerns about the relationship between politics and religion and, on the other, several different policies for regulating this relationship. Discussion of secularism therefore requires disaggregating both normative rationales and policies. One liberal rationale for separating politics and religion is that religion can be socially divisive. To the extent that a political affirmation of or support for religion is divisive, politics and religion should be separated. To the extent that this concern with avoiding political and social divisiveness is an important aspect of secularism, a number of issues arise, both regarding the theoretical meaning of secularism as anti-divisiveness and about the practical policy measures that follow from this. The Paper considers some of these issues, both with a view to discussing the theoretical understanding of secularism that this provides and the practical policy implications that follow from it. Theoretically, the first question is what counts as divisiveness? The relevant sense of divisiveness cannot be purely descriptive. It must rather be normatively informed by the values justifying the concern with divisiveness in the first place. Practically, the question about which policies for regulating religion follow from the concern with divisiveness is not only a matter of understanding what secularism in this sense requires but also for assessing whether the position understood thus is plausible. The Paper considers these issues with a point of departure in Laborde’s work, but with a view to discussing what secularism requires politically today and whether it is a plausible position under current societal conditions.