The Paradox of Political Secularism and How to Solve it

One of the most influential recent accounts about political secularism is Joselyn Maclure's and Charles Taylor's "liberal pluralism." According to this view, political secularism must be understood as a complex notion that combines moral principles (freedom of conscience and equal respect) and institutional principles (church-state separation and neutrality of the state). While this view is compelling in its conceptualization of several public controversies about religion –especially in matters about religious exceptions and accommodations on the grounds of religious reasons-- it leads to a paradox, namely, that regimes that are paradigmatically considered as secular are excluded from liberal pluralism's definition of secularism and regimes with established churches might be included into the group of secular regimes. This paradox makes stronger the criticism that authors such as Veit Bader have advanced in favor of dropping off the term "secularism" from our political vocabulary. According to this criticism –which I call secularism eliminativism-- defenses of political secularism are redundant, irrelevant, and socially divisive. Therefore, the criticism continues, debates about the role of religion in the public sphere would be better off if the concept 'secularism' is eliminated altogether. The purpose of the paper is to respond to this criticism by introducing the concept/conception distinction into the understanding of secularism and therefore solving the paradox of liberal pluralism. The distinction intends to show that liberal pluralism is a conception of political secularism, and that there are many other conceptions that might or might not embrace liberal pluralism's moral and institutional principles. In doing this, I show that all three clusters of the eliminativist criticism can be responded and therefore that inquiries for a just society must include considerations about appropriate understandings of political secularism.