José Casanova

Religion, European Secular Identities and European Integration

Since the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 that established the EEC and initiated the ongoing process of European integration, Western European societies have undergone a rapid, drastic, and seemingly irreversible process of secularization. In this respect, one can talk of the emergence of a post-Christian Europe. At the same time, the process of European integration, the eastward expansion of the European Union, and the drafting of a European constitution have triggered fundamental questions concerning European identity and the role of Christianity in that identity. What constitutes “Europe”? How and where should one draw the external territorial and the internal cultural boundaries of Europe? The most controversial, yet rarely openly confronted and therefore most anxiety-producing, issues are the potential integration of Turkey and the potential integration of non-European immigrants, who in most European countries happen to be overwhelmingly Muslim. But the eastward expansion of the European Union, particularly the incorporation of an assertive Catholic Poland, and the debates over some kind of affirmation or recognition of the Christian heritage in the preamble of the new European constitution, have added unexpected “religious” irritants to the debates over Europeanization. It is the interrelation between these phenomena – the role of Catholic Poland, the incorporation of Turkey, the integration of Muslim immigrants, and references to the Christian heritage in the European constitution – and the European secular mindset that I would like to explore in this chapter.

Cosmopolitanism, the clash of civilizations and multiple modernities:

The article examines the three alternative conceptions of the emerging global order with special reference to the place and role of the world religions in that order. (1) Cosmopolitanism builds upon developmental theories of modernization that envision this transformation as a global expansion of western secular modernity, conceived as a universal process of human development. Secularization remains a key analytical as well as normative component. Religions that resist privatization are viewed as a dangerous ‘fundamentalism’ that threatens the differentiated structures of secular modernity. (2) Huntington’s conception of the ‘clash of civilizations’ maintains the analytical components of western modernity but stripped of any universalist normative claim. Modernity is a particular achievement of western civilization that is grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The world religions are the continuously vital core of what are essentially incompatible civilizations doomed to clash with one another for global hegemony. (3) The model of ‘multiple modernities’ is presented as an alternative analytical framework that combines some of the universalist claims of cosmopolitanism, devoid of its secularist assumptions, with the recognition of the continuous relevance of the world religions for the emerging global order.

Catholic and Muslim Politics in Comparative Perspective

The contemporary global discourse on Islam as a fundamentalist antimodern and undemocratic religion shows striking similarities with the old discourse on Catholicism that predominated in Anglo-Protestant societies, particularly in the United States, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. The essay draws some comparisons between old Catholic and current Muslim politics at three different levels: (1) at the level of the transnational structures of Catholicism and Islam as world religions; (2) at the level of religious political parties and movements in national politics; and (3) at related issues of immigrant incorporation of Catholics in Anglo-Protestant societies in the past and of Muslims in ”secular-Christian” Western societies today.

The politics of nativism Islam in Europe, Catholicism in the United States

The politics of nativism directed at Catholic immigrants in 19th-century America offer a fruitful comparative perspective through which to analyze the discourse and the politics of Islam in contemporary Europe. Anti-Catholic nativism constituted a peculiar North American version of the larger and more generalized phenomenon of anti-immigrant populist xenophobic politics which one finds in many countries and in different historical contexts. What is usually designated as Islamo-phobia in contemporary Europe, however, manifests striking resemblances with the original phenomenon of American nativism that emerged in the middle of the 19th century in the United States. In both cases one finds the fusion of anti-immigrant xenophobic attitudes, perennial inter-religious prejudices, and an ideological construct setting a particular religious-civilizational complex in essential opposition to Western modernity. Although an anti-Muslim discourse emerged also in the United States after 11 September, it had primarily a geo-political dimension connected with the ‘war on terror’ and with American global imperial policies. But it lacked the domestic anti-immigrant populist as well as the modern secularist anti-Muslim dimensions. This explains why xenophobic anti-Muslim nativism has been much weaker in the United States than in Europe.

It's All About Identity, Stupid:

AFTER TWO CENTURIES OF ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE MORE RECENT PROGRESS OF SECULARISM, RELIGION HAS AGAIN REARED ITS HEAD AS ONE OF THE MORE CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES IN EUROPE

Nativism and the Politics of Gender in Catholicism and Islam

The contemporary global discourse on Islam as a fundamentalist, antimodern, undemocratic, and sexist religion shows striking similarities with the old discourse on Catholicism that predominated in Anglo-Protestant societies, particularly in the United States, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Both discourses were based on four similar premises: (a) a theologico-political distinction between “civilized” and “barbaric” religions—that is, between religions compatible with Enlightenment principles and liberal democratic politics, on the one hand, and, on the other, religions grounded in traditions that resisted the progressive claims of the Enlightenment philosophy of history, liberalism, and secularism; (b) a nativist anti-immigrant posture that postulated the unassimilability of foreign immigrants due to their uncivilized social customs and habits; (c) transnational attachments and loyalties either to a foreign religious authority (i.e., the papacy) or to a transnational religious community (i.e., the ummah) that appeared incompatible with republican citizen principles and the exclusive claims of the modern nation-state; and (d) a set of moral claims about the denigration of women under religious patriarchies in contrast to their elevation by Protestantism. Any of these four principles may have been more or less salient at any particular time and place. It is their super-imposition, however, that has given the anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim discourses their compelling effect.

The Politics of the Religious Revival

If Zarathustra were to descend once again from the mountain, what would he make of the recent religious revival? Would he admit that he had been wrong, that “Deus absconditus” has now reappeared? Does this revival mean that the Enlightenment theory of religion was wrong? In view of the significance of religion, it is necessary to reassess that Enlightenment theory of religion and to inquire into the possible role jf religion in a reconstructed project of modernity. Yet, to overestimate the importance of religion in the modern world can result in two extreme and equally unsatisfactory consequences. An unreconstructed secularism, assuming that the criticism of religion is not yet complete, would postulate again the criticism of religion as the premise and the primary task of critique.

BALANCING RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND CULTURAL PRESERVATION

Abstract Religious freedom is becoming a universal aspiration, but the concept may mean different things in different countries. Therefore, religious freedom implementation methods and proselytizing methods need to be contextually specific. The principle of individual religious freedom is in tension with the right of indigenous people to protect their culture from external pressure. The U.S. can exhibit emergent global denominationalism-a social system where religious groups respect other faiths while defending and promoting their own truth claims. In the long run, the U.S. may accomplish more through an exemplary society than through religious freedom foreign policy measures.

The Karel Dobbelaere lecture: Divergent global roads to secularization and religious pluralism

This article analyzes the two divergent, though intertwined, roads of European secularization and global religious pluralism. In continental Western Europe, modernization and urbanization were accompanied by drastic secularization with limited religious pluralism. By contrast, in much of the rest of the world, in the Americas, North and South, throughout Asia and the Pacific and in Sub-Saharan Africa, modernization and urbanization have led to religious pluralism with limited secularization. In our contemporary global secular age, the parallel religious and secular dynamics are becoming ever more intertwined and interrelated.

Asian Catholicism, Interreligious Colonial Encounters and Dynamics of Secularism in Asia

The first section of the chapter offers a revisionist account of European secularization in terms of dynamics of state confessionalization and deconfessionalization. The second section presents a reconstruction of the interreligious colonial encounters of the early modern era in Japan and China, mediated by the Jesuits. The final section offers a brief analysis of three different patterns of inculturation of Catholicism in Asia as a key to three different phases of globalization: the early modern phase before Western hegemony, the modern Western hegemonic phase, and the contemporary phase after Western hegemony.