William E. Connolly’s Why I Am Not a Secularist (1999) has been hailed a landmark contribution to the study of secularism and modern society.  In it Connolly argues for a “refashioning” of secularism into an “ethos of engagement” that is more open to religious and metaphysical views, differing comprehensive doctrines, and a plurality of partisan beliefs and sources.  This kind of civic engagement means that when individuals and groups bring their perspectives into the public sphere they ought to admit the “comparative contestability” of their beliefs.  No beliefs, brought into the public sphere, are beyond critique or contestation.  This way agonistic democracy can be put into practice by allowing a diversity of perspectives to “work themselves out” in the public sphere.  Although Connolly’s ideas about secularism and its role in public discourse are insightful and provocative, I am going to argue that some of his critiques of modern day secularism are problematic at best, unwarranted at worst.

According to Connolly, modern day secularism has innumerable problems that it must face.  In the opening pages of his book, while discussing what he calls the “visceral register,” Connolly says, “modern secularism—in the main and for the most part—either ignores this register or disparages it.  It does so in the name of a public sphere in which reason, morality, and tolerance flourish.  By doing so I forfeits some of the very resources needed to foster a generous pluralism.”[1] This problem, what I call the “problem of inclusion,” is that although secularism is supposed to provide an atmosphere in which tolerance flourishes, it actually excludes voices, and is therefore intolerant.  This kind of exclusion of other voices, specifically religious voices, also creates an environment of hostility and antagonism, one that nurtures in the religious a feeling of disappointment and disdain for the secular public sphere.  “Refashioning secularism,” Connolly says, “might help to temper or disperse religious intolerance while honoring the desire of a variety of believers and nonbelievers to represent their faiths in public life.”[2]

Similarly, because secularism has come to occupy a place of authority in public political discourse, it now thinks of itself as the “center” of such discourse.  Connolly rejects any notion of one authority or “center” of the public sphere.  With his idea of an “ethos of engagement,” Connolly’s refashioning says, “no constituency would be allowed to represent authoritatively the single source from which all others must draw in public life…For, again, secular and religious struggles to occupy the authoritative center help to manufacture those reciprocal recipes of dogmatism discernible in and around us.”[3] The picture drawn by Connolly is one in which secularism and conservative Christianity maintain a reciprocal relationship around a struggle to occupy the place of public authority.  These historical tensions have created a bipartisan space that ignores, or fails to incorporate, those whose beliefs fall outside of it.

Connolly comments upon the traditional history of secularism in the West which thinks of religious hegemony as intolerant, totalitarian, and abusive and secularism as defending “private freedom, pluralistic democracy, individual rights, public reason, and the primacy of the state.”[4] Connolly thinks this “story prevails” because “it paints the picture of a self-sufficient public realm fostering freedom and governance without recourse to a specific religious faith.”[5] For him secularism is not worthy of this portrait, especially since it cannot draw a clear line between the “private” and the “public.”  John Rawls and Richard Rorty, to name only two, have sought to argue that religion and religious beliefs should be relegated to one’s private life, and that “public reason” should provide the parameters of the public sphere.  Rawls desires this for the purpose of establishing “a stable overlapping consensus,”[6] while Rorty desires it because he thinks religion “is far more likely to end a conversation than to start an argument.”[7] For Connolly, each of these authors, and secularism in general, assumes an easy and neat idea of what constitutes “religion.”

For Connolly, Deleuzian metaphysics can be used as a way of “reframing” the typical secular modus vivendi, especially as it is dialogue with Habermas, Kant, and Kierkegaard.  By encouraging this kind of dialogue, Connolly thinks, “we augment academic models of secular discourse.”[8] A way of augmenting or reframing secular discourse is, once again, to admit the contestability of religious and non-religious beliefs when they enter the public sphere.  Connolly sees how a fruitful connection can be made between different worldviews because (theistic and nontheistic) each of them “may contain an element of difference within itself from itself that tends to be blurred or obscured by the representations it makes of itself to others.”[9] Each worldview brought into the secular public sphere can at least connect by opposing the “straw-man” arguments that those who agree and disagree with them set up as accurate representations of their own beliefs.

Another connection that can be made between different constituencies and comprehensive doctrines is what Connolly calls “the politics of becoming.”  The politics of becoming is a method of engagement that seeks to bring about new social groups and individual identities by promoting “an ethos of critical responsiveness to the movement of difference.”[10] Connolly thinks that “antislavery movements, feminism, gay/lesbian rights movements, the introduction of secularism,” and others, are examples of the politics of becoming.  They refashion existing moral norms without doing away with morals altogether.  Connolly says Rawls “wants to freeze the liberal conception of the person and the secular conception public space today while everything else in and around the culture undergoes change”[11]; in this way Connolly thinks of Rawls as continuing the stagnant notion of the politics of being.  It is stagnant because, for Rawls, “secularism is the last historical moment in the politics of becoming Rawlsian categories authorize us to acknowledge.”[12]

In contrast with Rawls, Connolly does not want one authoritative center (in Rawls case liberal secularism) to occupy the center of public discourse.  Instead, Connolly uses Deleuze’s notion of the “rhizomatic” to explain how different constituencies can participate, not as a party “in the middle” or “outside the middle,” but as groups “made up of intersecting and interdependent minorities of numerous types and sorts who occupy the same territorial space and who negotiate an ethos of engagement between themselves.”[13] This model, according to Connolly, is a great alternative to nationalism, imperialism, chauvinism, and fascism. In this sense the democratic state becomes a “pluralized network” as opposed to a highly centralized and homogenous secular regime.

Connolly considers his ethos of engagement as an “alternative to both a secularism in which partisans pretend to leave their basic presumptions at home when they enter public life and a republican nation governed by a single conception of the common good.”[14] Here Connolly shows his distaste for the secular exhortation to keep religion and religious beliefs in the “private realm.”  He thinks secularism falsely assumes that people can disconnect their private from their public lives.  Secularism “pretends” to come to public life with a tabula rasa, when it actually comes with a set of deep convictions and robust philosophies.  Instead of assuming a mythic “neutrality,” secularism, and Christianity, ought to have an “agonistic respect for minorities who draw ethical inspiration from alternative sources, including nontheistic and asecular sources.”[15] Atheism, as depicted by Connolly, does not have agonistic respect for difference, since it thrives off antagonism.  “When atheism crosses that invisible line of separation between legitimate and illegitimate perspectives in public life,” Connolly thinks, “it becomes possible to render critical engagements among theists, nontheists, secularists, and atheists more “prudent,” “thoughtful,” and “fruitful.”[16] The pertinent question here is: who determines what counts as “legitimate” versus “illegitimate” perspectives in the public sphere.  For Connolly it seems this line is “invisible.”

Rather than asking people to “leave their metaphysical baggage at home when they participate,” Connolly thinks, “an overt metaphysical/religious pluralism in public life provides one key to forging a positive ethos of engagement out of the multidimensional plurality of contemporary life.”[17] This also means the negation of “an overarching faith acknowledged by all parties,” since this would go against fostering a deep pluralism in the public sphere.  While promoting what he calls “deep pluralism,” Connolly says that this kind of pluralism “depends upon reciprocal acknowledgement by a significant set of partisans of the uncertainty and profound contestability of the metaphysical suppositions and moral sources they honor the most.”[18] Finding partisans who acknowledge the contestability of their deeply held beliefs is the difficult part.

In response to Connolly, I am going to argue why some of his key positions are admirable, but that some of the conclusions he draws from them are not.  In order to critique these positions I am going to summarize what I consider to be central points made in Why I Am Not a Secularist:

1. Modern secularism needs refashioning into an “ethos of engagement” where persons and groups with metaphysical and/or religious beliefs are acknowledged in public discourse.
2. Every perspective that enters into public discourse ought to acknowledge its comparative contestability.
3. No one philosophy (i.e. secular liberalism or Christianity) should occupy the authoritative “center” of public discourse or politics.
4. The story secularists tell themselves about the origins and nature of secularism misses important historical facts.
5. Deep pluralism and the politics of becoming requires that minority views and asecular philosophies (i.e. metaphysical and/or religious beliefs) be allowed equal opportunity and inclusion into modern public discourse.

Each of these points says something about Connolly’s political trajectory.  His trajectory is admirable because it calls for “engagement,” “acknowledgement,” and a protection and invitation to divergent minority views to enter public discourse.  It also asks for modern secularists to see the faults of their own position and the ways in which it may ostracize persons and restrict political change.

On the other hand, I wonder what Connolly’s “refashioning,” “ethos of engagement,” and “politics of becoming” would actually look like in public political discourse.  The term “acknowledge” comes up quite a bit in this work and I wonder what is means.  Modern secularists “acknowledge” the reality of different metaphysical and religious views, they just think they are not meant to be entertained in public political discourse.  If by “acknowledge” Connolly means to “incorporate” differing metaphysical and religious views into public discourse, than his point loses its prophetic edge because many would argue that this is already occurring in the West.  We see and hear a plurality of voices all around us.  One might actually argue that secularism and atheism are the voices being silenced in public political discourse.  This is why atheism and secularism are thought of as “militant,” “exclusive,” and “divisive” in contemporary Western politics.

I consider Connolly’s second main point the most provocative one.  It asks persons and groups to admit the comparative contestability of their beliefs when engaging in public political discourse.  This is no easy feat.  For some people and groups, to be contested is to be disrespected.  Many think they have the “absolute truth” and therefore cannot admit its contestability.  Unfortunately pragmatism and fallibilism are not considered virtues in many public venues.  Connolly is right to encourage contestability in public discourse, but many cannot accept this.  Connolly has already lost the dogmatists, which are many.  Similarly, contestability happens often in contemporary political discourse, specifically in public debate.  Yet it is true that many of the assumptions held by modern political culture are not contested, they are wrongly assumed to be “self-evident” or “given.”

Many who accept democracy, political exchange, and condemn hegemony, totalitarianism, and fascism easily agree upon the third point, that no single group should occupy the authoritative center of public political discourse.  It is difficult, however, to think of what Connolly has in mind here.  Does this mean he is against the United States’ two-party system?  Does he need a three, four, or five party system?  In my opinion, if one is going to take a rhyzomatic approach to politics, she would be lead to a socialist perspective.  Connolly never directly addresses this question, for he mainly discusses the rhyzomatic as a method of engagement between different constituencies. Yet a socialist organization of society and its political system seems to me the only kind of system that Connolly’s “ethos of engagement” would work in.  I am personally fine with socialism, but Connolly seems to think that a socialist perspective can be fit into a Capitalistic social and political system.  Although it sounds good on paper, it is most likely impossible in the system we inhabit.  It is a Procrustean bed.

Connolly challenges secularism, not simply as a model of politics, but also as a modus vivendi that has a false conception of what its history is.  Secularists, as Connolly thinks, have painted an all-too-simple picture of religion and religious beliefs.  They look back at medieval Christendom and contrast it with Enlightenment secularism, its progresses, virtues, and achievements.  It views itself as the answer to religious wars, religious hegemony, and totalitarianism.  It thinks of itself as the progeny of the scientific revolution, the elevation of reason, and a mode of cleaning public discourse from dubious metaphysical assumptions and religious beliefs.  Connolly challenges this story of secularism and its “rounded,” “complete,” or “self-sufficient” view of itself.

It is true that an overly simplistic view of the history of secularism can be misleading.  It can lead people to accept a nice and clear story of the rise of secularism.  The truth is that the rise of secularism and secularity is complex, often intertwining cultural, political, economic, social, and religious shifts in understanding.  For instance, Newton was a frontiersman for science and yet he was a strange kind of Christian alchemist.  Not to mention Martin Luther who, in spite of his deeply held religious commitments, argued for the separation of Church and State.  John Locke was another precursor to liberal democracy who argued for The Reasonableness of Christianity, and George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln argued for religious freedom from a deistic perspective. History tells us a story of secularism that is mixed with the deeply religious, nominally religious, quasi-religious, as well as those who held what were deemed explicitly heretical views about the Church, Christ, salvation, and the nature of humanity.  In my mind, one can still be a thoroughgoing modern secularist without ignoring the “blind spots” that some secularists forget were there.  I agree with this kind of “refashioning.”

As far as deep pluralism is concerned, I think Connolly is wrong for pitting secularism against it.  It is my understanding that secularism provides the bare outlines for the workings of a radically diverse society.  It guarantees religious freedom (Free Practice Clause) as well as keeps the political system from being controlled by any given religious group (Establishment Clause).  Secularism is, and always has been, an ideology, so it would be wrong to call it “neutral” or “objective.”  At the same time, it is an ideology that has secured many of our rights as citizens, and has allowed for the flourishing of a diverse society.  Not to mention that it has granted privileges to religious persons and groups, despite what its opponents say. As I understand it, secularism is what religious pluralism needs to continue.

Depending on how we define the “public sphere”—as the sphere of the press, media, colleges, libraries, and city halls, or extended to include Congress—we may end up with different conclusion about religions role in this sphere.  As far as I can see, the press, various media, colleges, libraries, and city halls have and do practice agonistic engagement with different comprehensive doctrines.  They may have yet to incorporate more plurality, and should do so, but they still allow various religious and secular expressions and exercises into the “public sphere.”  Congress and the Supreme Court, the realpolitik of United States legislation, is another matter.  Following the Constitution these institutions are meant to be as “neutral” as possible about religion, and are therefore called to have a secular modus operandi.  Despite this, the United States has continued to be an overwhelmingly religious country, as is seen by the beliefs of our elected representatives.  Connolly even notes this by saying, ”No public advocate of atheism, to my knowledge, currently holds a major public office in the United States.”[19] If one were to fight for minority rights and promote an “ethos of engagement,” they should do so for secularists and atheists.

For all his talk about “engagement,” “acknowledgement,” and “respect,” Connolly almost completely ignores the evident problems with religious organizations and religious beliefs.  It would be ideal if different persons and constituencies could move past their “visceral register,” admit the contestability of their deeply-help beliefs and assumptions, and hear each other out.  What happens in the real world is something completely different.  Freedom entails difference; difference entails deep-seated disagreements, disagreements that will not be remedied.  The agonistic model of discourse is more civil and convivial, but the antagonism that exists between certain persons and groups may be inevitable.  If Connolly’s model were put into practice, deep pluralism would be cloaked with superficiality and inauthentic congeniality.  By seeking to provide answers to the problems facing a radically diverse society, Connolly may actually be working against deep pluralism.

Overall, I can see why Connolly’s book is considered seminal.  It calls for an unique refashioning of secularism, a method of agonistic engagement between persons and parties with different comprehensive doctrines, and promotes a deep pluralism where no one group or ideology holds the authoritative center of public political discourse.  He calls secularists to take a closer look at the history of secularism and encourages them to be more open to hearing metaphysical and religious beliefs.  Connolly also wants people accept the contestability of their beliefs in the public sphere.  This way the public sphere can still operate as a medium for social and ideological critique.

In light of all of these virtues Connolly’s book still has a few problems.  Firstly, Connolly puts forward many ideals that may never occur as long as difference does.  To be agonistic instead of antagonistic; to admit the contestability of your beliefs; to try and fit a socialist idea of the public sphere into a Capitalistic society; and to rise above visceral reactions, are tall exhortations for a society like the United States.  The ever-widening gap between the ideal and the real, the ought and the is, is disparaging for projects like Connolly’s.  It is disparaging for all who want change, and at least Connolly wants that.

---

[1] William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3

[2] Ibid, 5

[3] Ibid, 6

[4] Ibid, 20

[5] Ibid, 21

[6] John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 151-52

[7] Richard Rorty, “Religion As Conversation-stopper,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), 171

[8] Why I Am Not a Secularist, 46

[9] Ibid, 44

[10] Ibid, 58-59

[11] Ibid, 66

[12] Ibid, 66

[13] Ibid, 92

[14] Ibid, 155

[15] Ibid, 157

[16] Ibid, 160

[17] Ibid, 185

[18] Ibid, 185

[19] Ibid, 158