The proliferation of state-funded forums of interreligious dialogue and encounter has been both driver and symptom of the increased salience of religion in secular European public spheres—and as such a cornerstone of debates on ‘post-secularity’ (Jürgen Habermas) or ‘counter-secularisation’ (Jan-Philipp Steinmann). Developed in response to anxieties about Islam, I investigate how such interreligious dialogue projects operate in practice. I am particularly interested in the communicative regime that ‘dialogue’ instantiates, and in the civic implications of public (inter-)religious talk for our understanding of secular political orders. To investigate these issues, I rely on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the German interreligious dialogue sector. In adopting an ethnographic method, I follow recent calls by Lisa Herzog and Bernardo Zacka for a form of ‘fieldwork in political theory’ to rejuvenate our understanding of foundational political concepts—such as the one of ‘secularism’.
Empirically, I make two central observations. First, interreligious dialogue projects are funded from the public purse and tasked with ‘integrating’ and ‘deradicalising’ Muslims. These integrationist and securitarian objectives are supposed to be achieved, I argue, by turning interreligious dialogue sessions into real-world instantiations of the Habermasian ideal of ‘communicative action’. In the communicative ‘ideal speech situation’, Muslims are supposed to experience themselves as participants of universal discourse liberated from their identitarian religious attachments. Second, however, this secular management of religion in the public sphere is placed firmly in Protestant hands. Protestant organisations control dialogue projects institutionally, spatially, and ideationally; they are tasked by the state to re-educate Muslims and foster an ‘Islamic Reformation’ on the Protestant model. Dialogue’s communicative rules are central to this dynamic, I argue, given that the ‘ideal speech situation’ they create represents a Protestant discursivity of sincerity and conversion through which Muslim participants are to be transformed.
These analytical observations generate distinct theoretical upshots. The central argument of this article is that the substantive kernel of a potential secular ‘identity’ or ‘ideology’ (Workshop question 3) is furnished by Protestantism. Put differently, secular orders establish a hierarchy between religious traditions, in which mainstream Protestant groups represent ‘the secular’ (Workshop question 2). In this context, I build on historical, philosophical, and anthropological scholarship, which has highlighted the extent to which ‘secularism’ (as a political project) and ‘the secular’ (as an epistemic category) are constitutively derived from European Protestantism (see e.g. Yael Almog, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Charles Taylor). Political scientists have yet to reckon with the resultant contention that secular orders should not be understood as constituted by a ‘separation’ or ‘cleavage’ between religion and politics. Instead, I argue that Protestantism continues to be the spark animating secular orders today. Hence, hegemonic civic ideals—what it means to be, act, and communicate as a citizen of the secular state—continue to reflect this Protestant normativity and prerogative.
