Debates about the process of secularization have, in recent years, centred on the work of a group of sociologists and historians, mostly British, who have put forth and debated what is known as ‘the secularization thesis’. 1 This correlates modernization with secularization, and generally measures secularization pri- marily through declining church membership and declared religious beliefs. In most of this discussion, secularization is attributed almost exclusively to socio-economic change, without significant reference to the state, to ideas, or to political movements. While there have been modifications of the thesis over time, one recent definition shows that it still retains its essential characteris- tics: the secularization thesis is a ‘research programme with, at its core, an explanatory model’ which ‘asserts that the social significance of religion dimin- ishes in response to the operation of three salient features of modernization, namely 1) social differentiation, 2) societalization, and 3) rationalization’. 2 These factors are defined later, but clearly all three involve societal change rather than changes in ideas, political movements or the state. Advocates of the Nikki R. Keddie Secularism and the State: Towards Clarity and Global Comparison
Debates about the process of secularization have, in recent years, centred on the
work of a group of sociologists and historians, mostly British, who have put
forth and debated what is known as ‘the secularization thesis’.1 This correlates
modernization with secularization, and generally measures secularization pri-
marily through declining church membership and declared religious beliefs.
In most of this discussion, secularization is attributed almost exclusively to
socio-economic change, without significant reference to the state, to ideas, or
to political movements. While there have been modifications of the thesis over
time, one recent definition shows that it still retains its essential characteris-
tics: the secularization thesis is a ‘research programme with, at its core, anexplanatory model’ which ‘asserts that the social significance of religion dimin-
ishes in response to the operation of three salient features of modernization,
namely 1) social differentiation, 2) societalization, and 3) rationalization’.2
These factors are defined later, but clearly all three involve societal change
rather than changes in ideas, political movements or the state. Advocates of the
secularization thesis have also tended to see it as a progressive one-wayprocess; societies and their constituent members become more secular asthey become more modernized. This article, in contrast, contends thatsuch an overwhelmingly ‘societal’ and non-political view cannot ade-quately explain secularization. Furthermore, it cannot explain the rise inrecent decades and in many parts of the world of anti-secular movementsand ideas.
The secularization thesis concentrates heavily on Great Britain, withsome attention to western Europe. Its advocates attribute Americanexceptionalism to such factors as a multiplicity of churches and ethnic-ity, or to the supposedly secular nature of American church teachings.3
The non-Christian and non-Western worlds are generally omitted fromthis debate. There secularization has, as I will show, been more influ-enced by government action than by autonomous societal changes, andtrends toward secularization have sometimes been dramatically reversed.The original secularization thesis, and even its modifications, tended to
see secularization as a one-way street. Religious revivals in the US or else-where were generally ignored or explained away. A leader of this schooleven wrote a book on the rise and fall of the US religious Right, pub-lished in 1988.4 Reversing the old saying, one might comment, ‘I’ll seeit when I believe it’.
The Complex Nature of Secularism
It is not just the conclusions of the secularization thesis that can be chal-lenged, but also its limited concept of secularization and the secular
which centres on declining religious belief and church membership.Secularization theory shares the linear-progressive viewpoint of modern-ization theory, and is really a sub-category of that theoretical approach.Although it is broadly true that societal secularization has usuallyaccompanied modernization, the theory is undialectical and plays downcontradictory forces. Hardly noted are the counter-examples to the view,including the fact that government secularization policies often bringabout anti-secular reactions, especially among certain classes and groups.In recent decades, rapid modernization has contributed not only to secu-larism but to major anti-secularizing trends, especially in countries with
growing fundamentalist movements.
1 This article had its origins in a paper written for a conference on past and future fins de siècle held at the Library of Congress in late 1994 and organized by Bruce Mazlish andAlvin Kibel. Thanks for helpful suggestions are due to them and the other participants,and also to others who have read and commented on the paper, including Charles Tilly,Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn and Theda Skocpol.2 Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, ‘Secularization: The Orthodox Model’, in Steve Bruce, ed.,
Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis, Oxford1994, pp. 8–9.3
For the secularization thesis and some articles critical of it, see especially Bruce, Relig-ion and Modernization; the US is the focus of Roger Finke’s contribution, ‘An UnsecularAmerica’, pp. 145–69. The whole idea of a uniform process of secularization isattacked in David Martin, The Religious and the Secular: Studies in Secularization, London1969.4 Steve Bruce, The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Right: Conservative Protestant Politics in
America 1978–1988, Oxford 1988. The book does make valid points about the narrowbase and legislative failures of the Christian Right.
Even Bryan R. Wilson, a founding father of the secularization thesis,notes that many who write of it limit their evidence to church member-ship, their subject of study to Christianity, and their idea of seculariza-tion to just one of its many meanings.5 One may add that even suchmajor Christian countries as France and Italy are rarely mentioned insuch works. Nor is history much mentioned by the sociologists involved.
One may agree with these sociologists that modernization and its sub-categories of urbanization, migration, and industrialization were by andlarge associated in the West with a weakening of religious institutionsand belief. But we might find other modernizing forces that correlatewith secularization, including such cultural factors as the rise of literacyand public education, and the emergence of new types of reading mater-ial and entertainment. There seems no reason to pick some aspects of modernization and not others as causing secularization.
Further, there is little reason to think that levels of church membership
or declared belief are sufficient measures of secularization. Secular atti-tudes and behaviour are characteristic of many church members andbelievers. In many societies, modernization has produced two major cul-tures in each religion, roughly, that of the secular and that of the truebeliever, and in many areas there has been a reaction against secularnationalist culture and rule. Particularly in the US, in some ex-com-munist countries, and some non-Western ones there has been a religiousreaction which also has political implications. Studies including morecountries might yield more complex and dialectical generalizations thanthose posed by the secularization thesis.6
A different trend in the scholarly study of secularization and secularism isto stress the role and writings of intellectuals like Locke, Milton, Voltaire,
Jefferson and others. While, like the purely sociological view, this outlookcontains some truth, both views greatly understate the role of politics andthe state in both social secularization and the spread of secularist views.
Secularism and the State
While the word ‘secularization’ is commonly used mainly for a social
trend and the word ‘secular’ is applied largely to governmental policy,the two are profoundly, if dialectically, related in a way not covered bythe secularization thesis. A secularized population encourages a secularstate, but secular states also encourage mass secularization, especially of the schools and of those receiving schooling. Some consideration of thesecularization of the state and of politics is needed to understand the sec-ularization of society.
5 Bryan R. Wilson, ‘Reflections on a Many-Sided Controversy’, in Bruce, Religion and
Modernization.6 Some of the pros and cons of the secularization thesis are discussed in various articles byKarel Dobbelaere, who also provides bibliographies: ‘Secularization: A Multi-Dimen-sional Concept’, Current Sociology, vol. 29, no. 2, Summer 1981, pp. 1–213; ‘SecularizationTheories and Sociological Paradigms: A Reformulation of the Private-Public Dichotomyand the Problem of Societal Integration’, Sociological Analysis , vol. 46, no. 4, Winter 1985,pp. 377–386; ‘Some Trends in European Sociology of Religion: The SecularizationDebate’, Sociological Analysis, same issue, pp. 107–37.
No state today is entirely secular or entirely non-secular. The verystrengthening of a state demanded by modern economies requires con-siderable state control of public education, civil law, welfare and otherspheres that is more secular than anything that existed in the past. Alarge degree of secularism is a necessary concomitant of the modernindustrial world. Even fundamentalist Iran soon adopted a series of essentially secular laws and procedures, and Khomeini in a sense secular-
ized religion, especially in his startling 1988 decree which stated thatQur’anic obligations, like daily prayer, could give way to reasons of state.7 A similar secularization will probably occur in any fundamental-ist government that hopes to keep power. At the opposite extreme, nostate yet seen has been purely secular, whether the word is used to meanstate separation from religion or state control of religion. (State separa-tion and state control are not absolutes, and do not exhaust all the politi-cal meanings of secularism, which is a contested and changing concept.)8
The two currently salient political meanings of state control and state
separation are often not distinguished. For many Westerners the word‘secular’ means essentially the ‘separation of church and state’—to usethe American formulation. Secularists in this sense are those who believein that separation, whatever their private religious beliefs. This wordingof a common idea is especially American, and America may come closerto such a separation than any other major Western country. Americanscan note that this separation has not hurt religion in the US, but hasallowed for the flowering of a variety of sects and churches, bothChristian and non-Christian. Even this formulation, no matter how it isworded, may not be an adequate description of reality which is much
more varied than any such phrase would imply. First, to judge by thesituation in some of the most secular Western countries, church and stateare nowhere wholly separate, and usually have important ties, whetheror not the church-state relationships favour a single established ordominant religion. (For purposes of brevity, the word ‘church’ here willbe taken to mean the institutions of all organized religions, and theword ‘state’ will refer to all levels of government—central, provincialand local.) In Germany and Spain, for example, the state collects reli-
7 See especially Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic , Berkeley1993, p. 57: ‘The government in Islam’, Khomeini elaborated, ‘is a primary rule havingprecedence over secondary rulings such as praying, fasting, and performing the hajj . . .’ Inshort, the state, so long as it was a truly Islamic state, could overrule the highest-rankingclerics and their interpretation of the sacred law’.8 In John Ruedy’s excellent summary, ‘Secular is a term used to distinguish the temporalor worldly from the spiritual, while secularism has come to denote a philosophy that priv-ileges the domain of the temporal and diminishes that of the spiritual. The former growsto cover civil affairs and education, while the latter is increasingly restricted to the areas of private belief, worship, and conduct. While secularism as a philosophy is central to theWestern experience, it should be borne in mind that the concept has evolved historicallyand that it is still doing so. What was considered the proper province of human rational
decision was different in the fifteenth century than in the nineteenth century and is evenmore different in the late twentieth. Secondly, it should be stressed that the struggle overthe frontier between the secular and the religious is one characterized by continuous ten-sion and that, up to now, the exact line of the frontier between the two has never beenagreed upon. One must also recognize that in the West there has seldom been agreementamong secularists as a group, nor among the religious as a group, as to where exactly thatfrontier should be’. Introduction to John Ruedy, ed., Islamism and Secularism in North
gious taxes that are used to support the church; in France the state helpssupport churches and some mosques; and in Great Britain there is anestablished religion, a law of blasphemy—however rarely employed—that covers only the majority religion, and state support for variousforms of religious education.9
Even in the US, which at least since the 1962 Supreme Court decision
against prayer in the schools has been arguably the most secular of majorWestern countries, the state indirectly supports the vast network of church schools and institutions by exempting them from taxes as non-profit organizations and by certain other indirect subsidies. Nor is whatmay seem like a strict church-state separation always rigorously en-forced; prayer in schools, for example, is still quite widespread in severalareas of the US despite its being illegal.10 And in 1997 the SupremeCourt may have heralded a less-strict church-state separation when itreversed a recent decision of a past Supreme Court and said that publicschool teachers could teach certain special classes in parochial schoolclassrooms. (An apparently ‘anti-religious’ Supreme Court decision alsoin 1997 seems more limited in its church-state implications.) Anotherchurch-state issue coming to the fore both federally and at state level isthe proposal, already enacted in a few states, for state-subsidized vouch-ers for poor children to attend private—mostly religious—schools. Sucha provision has recently been successfully challenged as unconstitutionalin a Wisconsin appeals court, but voucher proposals remain very muchalive. In the US, and to a degree elsewhere, state-school issues have beencentral to conflicts over secularism, and the lines of acceptance and con-
flict on these and other questions are continually changing.
Besides the ambiguity of such concepts as separation of church and state,particularly when the ideal is compared to actual conditions, there is thefact that some applications of ‘secularism’ in practice mean somethingquite antithetical to the ideal of church-state separation. They produceinstead increasing control of the church by the state. This is clearest in anumber of non-Western countries, including modern Turkey, PahlaviIran, Bourguiba’s Tunisia, and Nasser’s Egypt. In such countries, withstrong religious institutions that formerly controlled of much of law,
education and social welfare, the state had to take power from thoseinstitutions to introduce modernizing and centralizing changes. Such
9 Peter G. Forster, ‘Secularization in the English Context: Some Conceptual and EmpiricalProblems’, The Sociological Review, vol. 20, no. 2, May 1972, pp. 153–68. Forster notesthat sociologists tend to dismiss the importance of English state defense of the Church,but that it includes ‘the position of the monarch as head of church as well as state, thebishops in the House of Lords, the Mayor’s Sunday, the oath in court, religious broadcast-ing on the BBC, church parades in the armed forces, subsidies to church schools, and aboveall the collective worship and religious instruction in state schools. Though these obser-vances are not generally obligatory, one must generally contract out to avoid them . . .
Nearly every English child is exposed to the religious component of dominant values . . .when the truth of Christianity is affirmed at morning assembly’. (pp. 164–5) Recent writ-ers have noted the frequent use in urban schools of legally allotted religious time to teachthings other than Christianity, however.10 One article estimates that 25 per cent of US schools still begin with Bible or prayer read-ing, and many end with released time for religious instruction. N.J. Demerath III andRhys H. Williams, ‘A Mythical Past and an Uncertain Future’, Church-State Relations—Tensions and Transitions, New Brunswick 1987.
state control of religious institutions has been more important in theWest than is usually realized, with the modern state taking over muchof education, including parts formerly controlled by churches, and regu-lating church behaviour in a variety of ways. Especially in ‘backward’European countries whose rulers wanted to catch up with the West—such as Russia both before and under communism—state control andmanipulation of religion and the church were notable. Communist coun-
tries are often not referred to as secular, perhaps because the state controlof the church was so obvious, and yet on this point there was littleto choose between communist countries and Ataturk’s ‘secular’ Turkeywhich, if anything, more forcibly changed religion and permissiblereligious practices. On this point, as on some others mentioned, thereappears to be a continuum—from countries with little control by thestate over the church to countries with a great deal of control—and it isnot always clear which countries should be called secular.
The phenomenon of continuities and continuums between the secularand the non-secular exists in belief as well as in practice. It is nonethelesstrue that in the realm of belief there are clusters on each end of the con-tinuum—on the one side, those who do not believe religion should mixin politics at all, and, on the other, those who strongly believe that itshould. The latter are often referred to as ‘fundamentalists’. Many secu-larists are ideological and politically committed, as are anti-secularists.Indeed, secularism has been called an ideology, and some secularistsbehave in ideological fashion.
The Non-Western Experience of Secularism
The usual procedure in making comparisons covering both Western andnon-Western countries in modern times is to begin with the West,where a whole series of modern developments came earliest, and thenproceed eastward. This is a logical approach but, in the case of secular-ism, an important new perspective may be gained if we first turn to whathappened in the past two centuries in many non-Western countrieswhere secularization was an important issue, and then see if this shedslight on Western developments.
In the non-Western world, secularism, whether or not the word waswidely used, seems to have been especially important in Muslimcountries and in South Asia. The basic reasons for its importance inMuslim countries are not hard to find. First, as in Judaism and Christ-ianity, the prevailing religion was monotheistic and scriptural, implyinga basic minimum of common belief and practice among believers. Inall three religions, education, law, and social practice all had strongreligious elements, involving both considerable control by religiousinstitutions and a set of beliefs guiding ideology and activity. In addi-
tion, Christianity and Islam had religious institutions with considerableeconomic and political power. Such cultural, political, and economicpower in the hands of religious institutions was tied to traditionalways of doing things which affected both economic and political struc-tures. Thus, as modernization developed, the old religious institutionscame under attack by intellectuals and rulers. These institutions wereinadequate to, and could not quickly adapt to, modern technology,
science, centralized and bureaucratic political structures. This is a sim-plified and schematic picture of the rise of political secularization inboth the Christian and Muslim worlds, and, to a degree, of that in
Judaism. Islamic history is different from Western Christian history,partly because modernizing trends began earlier and have been moregradual in the West, and also because Islam has not had a strongsecular legal tradition. These are two of the factors that have made sec-
ularization more difficult and contentious in recent decades in theIslamic world than in the West, while all the main scriptural mono-theistic religions have been more resistant to secularization than haveother religious traditions.
In India there was a variation on the above pattern. Hinduism was farfrom scriptural or monotheistic, and it has even been argued that itwas not, in premodern times, really a religion at all, if religion is takento mean a common body of beliefs.11 Its institutions were more localand varied than were those of Christianity or Islam, but they were,often allied with government, law and education. In India, the rise of secularism, before and after independence, was largely tied to thecreation of a nation-state, originally as part of the anti-British struggle.If identities remained primarily religious, there was no chance of cre-ating a unified nation. And if Hinduism was to be openly favouredover other religions, there was similarly no chance of developing a multi-religious national liberation struggle, or of keeping the nation unitedafter independence. The fact that other religions, notably Islam, Christ-ianity, and Sikhism, were more scriptural and unified gave the Hindus
who took the secular approach of the Indian National Congress andlater the Congress Party all the more reason to work to keep religion outof politics.
Western works about secularism usually stress intellectual or socialbelief, but in non-Western countries these were less important than gov-ernmental—and sometimes oppositional—political motivations, oftentied to economic interests. There were relatively few intellectual figureswith relatively little influence espousing secularism before it became amajor political or governmental cause. As for popular belief, there is
no doubt but that non-Western modernizing governments greatlypreceded their populations in secularist beliefs and practices. Thisprimacy of governments in secularization has been somewhat obscuredby the fact that not only Western but also indigenous scholars oftenprefer to discuss the achievements of intellectuals rather than those of governments. While more intellectuals preceded governments in secu-larism in the West, even in this field scholarship often overstates therole of intellectuals.
A brief summary of secularization in the Middle East since the nine-
teenth century may illustrate my point. Here the stress will be on theOttoman Empire and Turkey, which had the longest and ultimately themost radical secularization process; but the trends discussed were foundelsewhere, and other countries will be mentioned.
11 See especially the chapters by Guenther D. Sontheimer and Robert Eric Frykenberg inSontheimer and Hermann Kulke, eds, Hinduism Reconsidered , Delhi 1959.
Secularization in the Middle East is inseparable both from Western-ization and from efforts to strengthen the central state. While it is oftensaid that state and church were inseparably intertwined in pre-modernIslam, this is not really true. In the first Islamic centuries, after the firstfour pious caliphs, dynasties often paid little attention to what was said
by Islam or the religious classes—at most no more attention than pre-modern Western rulers did to Christianity.12 Administration and foreignrelations were carried out with minimal attention to Islam. While therewas much less non-religious law than in the West, Islamic rulers didhave large legal spheres in which the state, not the religious judges,made decisions, and some basis in tradition or in writing by which suchlaw worked. In the period called ‘early modern’ in the West, the Safaviddynasty in Iran and the Ottomans in the Ottoman Empire ruled states inwhich the religious classes, or ulama, were more a corporate body thanever before. Especially in the Ottoman Empire, there were governing
institutions with considerable independence of religious bodies. Thesesocieties were not, however, secular in any modern sense, as dominantideas took a religious form; the ulama controlled most education, law,and social services, and also had possession of religious taxes and of inalienable donations of so-called vaqf land and goods. Not only werereligious institutions and intellectual hegemony far stronger than inmost modern societies, but the central state was weaker and, at least inmost periods, more decentralized.
In its early centuries, the Ottoman state had a series of major and minor
military victories over European Christians, and felt no need to emulatethe West. Beginning in the late-seventeenth century, however, it beganto suffer the reversals that continued over the next two centuries. Thetreaties of Karlowitz in 1699 and Kuchuk Kaynarca in 1774 markedmajor losses to Austria and Russia. In the nineteenth century, liberationmovements among the Ottoman Balkan Christians cut away long-heldterritory, and further territory was lost in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth century.
Along with a growing realization of the strength of the West, this series
of defeats created two opposite reactions from the eighteenth centuryonwards. One was to try to emulate the West, especially in military mat-ters. The other was to react against unsuccessful Westernizing reformsby reasserting the old ways.13 Governmental reforms began as early asthe early eighteenth century; one of them was to introduce a printingpress with (Arabic) Ottoman characters. Like many other reforms thatmay not appear to us as attacks on religion and the religious classes, this
12 On Islam and the state, see especially Nikki R. Keddie, Iran and the Muslim World:
Resistance and Revolution, London 1995, ch. 15, and the sources cited therein. Among thebest-informed are Sami Zubaida, Islam, The People and the State, London 1989; Nazih N.Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World , London 1991 and ‘Rethink-ing the Public/Private Dichotomy: Radical Islam and Civil Society in the Middle East,Contention, vol. 4, no. 2, Winter 1995, pp. 79–105; and Ira Lapidus, ‘The Separation of State and Religion in the Development of Early Islamic Society, IJMES, vol. 6, no. 4, 1975,pp. 363–85.13 Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, Montreal 1964, ch. 2.
was taken as such. It was said that holy texts might be disseminatedwidely and be sullied, but there was also concern that the spread of learn-ing beyond the religious classes would weaken their position. Whenwars with the West recommenced, the reforms of the so-called ‘TulipPeriod’ were largely abandoned under conservative pressure.
Both the Ottoman and the Egyptian experience show that Western-
izing governmental reforms depended for success on a change in thestructure of the ruling classes. The old regimes in both areas were de-pendent until the nineteenth century on military groups who opposedthe adoption of Western-style military forces—in Egypt the Mamelukesand in the Ottoman Empire the janissaries. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt defeated and weakened the Mamelukes, making it possible forMohammad Ali (1805–48) to deal them the final blow and then tostrengthen and Westernize his armed forces. In the Ottoman Empirethere was no similar early weakening of the janissaries, and they over-threw the first reforming sultan, Selim III. Sultan Mahmud ii (1808–39) spent years preparing to oppose the janissaries, and then massacredthem in 1826, after which he undertook a series of primarily militaryreforms.
Secularism and Military Education
The military reforms of Mohammad Ali and Mahmud are not usuallypresented under the heading of secularization, but this was their result.Western uniforms and drill offended many of the ulama, and the first
new, Westernized schools that were set up outside religious institutionswere aimed at servicing the armed forces. These were military medicalschools, technical schools, and attached translation bureaux. It wasimpossible to modernize without reducing the prerogatives of ulamaand their—often elite—allies, and undermining traditions increasinglyidentified as ‘Islamic’.
The pragmatic and governmental impetus to early secularization was farmore important than the ideological impact of the French Revolution orEnlightenment thinking.14 Other governmental reforms in nineteenth-
century Egypt and the Ottoman Empire also had secular connotations:the bringing of vaqf and of religious taxes under greater governmentcontrol, the extension of modern, state-controlled education, the adop-tion of secular codes especially for trade, reforms in Islamic law and thebeginnings of its codification. Such reforms were needed to strengthenthe state in the face of Western incursion and internal revolt. Even a rulerseen as a religious reactionary, Abdul Hamid ii who reigned in the latenineteenth century, implemented many such self-strengthening mea-sures. They were, however, particularly associated with Mahmud ii and
14
Keddie, Iran and the Muslim World , ch. 15. In a famous article, important for informa-tion other than its main thesis, Bernard Lewis argues that the French Revolution wasquickly influential in Ottoman Turkey and could be so because its ideas were secular, notChristian. I have contested this idea in Iran and the Muslim World , as have other scholars.See ‘The Impact of the French Revolution on Turkey’, Journal of World History, vol. 1, July1953, pp. 105–25; also Serif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought , Princeton1962, 169ff; Niyazi Berkes, Secularism, pp. 83–5; and Ibrahim Abu Lughod, The Arab
Rediscovery of Europe, Princeton 1963, p. 134, no. 28.
with the leading statesmen of the subsequent period, called the tanzimat or ‘ordering’, in 1839–76. In nineteenth-century Egypt such centraliz-ing measures were undertaken especially by rulers—Mohammad Ali andlater Isma’il.15
In none of these undertakings did the limited utterances of intellectualsor changes in popular opinion regarding religion or church-state rela-
tions play a significant role. Modernization of the military, educationand trade was carried out—at first entirely and, even in the twentiethcentury, predominantly—from the top, so that past secularization in theMiddle East should be seen as primarily a phenomenon of the state andpolitics, rather than of intellectual life or social belief and practice.
Such secularization from above was a necessary accompaniment of theeconomic transformations taking place in these countries, which the oldreligio-legal structures with their lack of modern or secular law and theirties to agrarian society could not cope with. These transformations, like
secularization, had to be heavily promoted by governments, given theweakness of indigenous capitalist classes and the strengthh of Europeaneconomic competition. The economic changes achieved did not reach thestage of full-blown, much less free-market, capitalism.
In the Middle East, the dominant form of secularization—that initiatedby states—was not at all liberal and was rarely democratic. Not all lib-eral intellectual opinion in these countries was secularist. True, in stateswhere such secularization was relatively slow in coming—such as Iran,or even Egypt after the post-Mohammad Ali retreat on modernization—
a few nineteenth-century intellectuals were both liberal and anti-cleri-cal. In the Ottoman centre, however, the first independent politicalintellectuals—the Young Ottomans—attacked the over-centralizationbrought in by the tanzimat , including its religious policies. Their lead-ing intellectual, Namik Kemal, constructed an Ottoman past with theequivalent of a Western-style of separation of powers, in which the ulamaplayed a key role. The Young Ottomans were constitutionalists, andmost of them believed in a constitution that would be less centralizingand secularist than were the tanzimat statesmen.16 In their search formore democratic and decentralized structures, the Young Ottomans did
not adopt an anti-clerical position. The story of the Young Ottomans isone of several reminders that although secularism in the West is usuallyassociated with the Left and with liberalism, this association is notinevitable, particularly when secularization is government-controlled.When such secularization is in conflict with constitutionalism anddemocratization, it may give rise to defences of religion not only fromthe Right but also from the Left.
15 On Egyptian nineteenth-century reform and secularism see Juan R.I. Cole, Colonialism
and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s ‘Urabi Movement ,Princeton 1993; Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, Cambridge, Mass. 1990;Afaf Lutfi al Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad ‘Ali, Cambridge 1984, and theworks they cite.16 On Ottoman developments since the eighteenth century, including the Young Otto-mans, see especially Berkes, Secularism in Turkey, and Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of
Modern Turkey, London 1961. On the Young Ottomans see especially Mardin, The Genesisof Young Ottoman Thought .
Twentieth-century Ottoman history saw further governmental secular-ization, first under the rule of the so-called Young Turks. They retained,however, an uneasy compromise with religious institutions. Since thelate nineteenth century, the Sultan had pushed his claim to be the caliphof all Muslims, and the government was loath to take radical measures
against religious institutions. This changed with the transformationsbrought in by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who inaugurated the most secu-lar state in the Islamic world. Ataturk, unlike the rulers of other MiddleEastern countries, was in a position to do this for a number of reasons: 1)the sultan-caliph was compromised by his dependence on Western pow-ers, especially England; 2) the sultan-caliph had acquiesced in the Allieddismemberment, not only of the Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire, but,more seriously, of Anatolia itself where regions had been given toArmenians, Kurds, and Greeks; these developments had fatally compro-mised the old regime and its religious allies; 3) Mustafa Kemal was a vic-torious general in World War 1, and his fame and ability helped him torally the Turks to retake much of the territory occupied by the Greeksand others—he was thus seen as a strong national hero, unmatched inany other Muslim country; 4) defeat in war had weakened the entire oldregime, making it possible to build a quasi-revolutionary state struc-ture—something that would have been far more difficult in any otherMuslim country; 5) the Ottoman Turks had a longer and stronger historyof governmental modernization than any other Middle Eastern people,leaving them more prepared for further changes.
After a short period in which Ataturk used traditional religious languageand did not attack the caliphate, from 1923 onwards, he moved to abol-ishing first the sultanate and then the caliphate and then, up until hisdeath in 1938, getting parliament to pass a series of measures that thor-oughly undermined the power of religious institutions. The Arabic callto prayer and the Arabic alphabet were outlawed, Turkish was romanizedand there was a purge of Arabic and Persian words and elements—thesechanges all had religious implications. For a time, there was no higherreligious education permitted, and lower-level religious education was
severely curtailed. Alone among Muslim countries, Turkey abolished useof the sharia, religious law which by then in Turkey, as in several Muslimcountries, essentially covered only family and personal status matters. Itwas replaced by a slightly altered Swiss civil code. Women got equalrights in divorce and child custody; polygamy was outlawed; veiling washeavily discouraged; and women got to vote in national elections in1934, well before they did in France, Italy and Switzerland. Such devel-opments are signs of government-sponsored secularism, as traditionalreligious groups back patriarchal interpretations of their doctrines, andsee in women’s rights a weakening of their power.
Probably the best work on secularism in any Muslim country, NiyaziBerkes’s The Development of Secularism in Turkey, reads: ‘Two myths havesprung up and become established concerning the nature of the secular-ism emerging from the Kemalist Revolution. One is the belief that thissecularism means the separation of religion and state after the fashion of French laicism; the other is the belief that it was a policy of irreligion
aiming at the liquidation of Islam.’17 I would agree that neither theseparation of religion and state nor irreligion is a correct characterizationof Ataturk’s programme, but I disagree with Berkes’s subsequent pointthat the programme is best characterized as one aiming at ending theformer bifurcation of religious and secular spheres, and at producing amore modern and rational Islam.18 Such a description does not capture theessence of what Ataturk was doing: the establishment of state control over
religion and the religious classes. This included controlling and limitingreligious education, outlawing religious brotherhoods, profoundly alter-ing family and personal status matters and putting them under new statelaws instead of religious laws, severely limiting forms of male and femaledress associated with Islam, and decreeing new forms of ‘secular’ West-ern dress. These were all to a large degree questions of control and of power, words that all too rarely enter the discussions of secularism.
Berkes also suggests that Ataturk was trying to follow the popular will,but his acts clearly went far beyond what people would have asked for.Changes in the economy and society, such as rapidly increasing urban-ization and the growth in capitalist relations, had created new middle andbureaucratic classes that backed secularizing changes. There were alsointellectuals before and during the Ataturk period whose secularism wasindependent of the government. But the government under Ataturkmoved considerably beyond what the majority of the population wouldhave wanted or voted for. This is suggested, among other things, by the re-introduction of certain aspects of religion in the period following WorldWar II when a multi-party system and free elections were established, and
new parties challenged elements of Ataturkist secularism, culminating inan electoral plurality for the religious Welfare Party in December 1995.
Secularism is a principle of the Turkish constitution, and secularistsincluding the military forced the resignation of Welfare Party PrimeMinister Erbakan in 1997. Some threatened to outlaw the party on thebasis of acts they considered unconstitutional. Such acts, including ex-panding religious education and allowing more women to veil, wouldnot cause any stir in most Muslim countries, or indeed most Westernones, but a real struggle for power is involved. In August 1977, a secular
government proposal to expand the number of years all children mustspend in secular public schools, to the detriment of religious schools andtheir views, aroused extensive conflict. There is no doubt, however, thatmost Turks became more secular and less religiously observant in thedecades since 1925, and that the state’s secular policies, including educa-tion, were largely responsible for this.
Secularization in Other Muslim Countries
Government-initiated secularism is found in a number of other twen-
tieth-century Muslim countries, even though none went as far asAtaturk. The most dramatic changes came when old regimes were over-thrown—the Qajar dynasty in Iran by Reza Shah in 1925; the Egypt-ian monarchy by Naguib and Nasser in 1952; the Iraqi monarchy in
1958 with the eventual victory of the Baath Party under SaddamHussein; and the Dutch by nationalists in Indonesia. The old regimeshad often tried to placate the ulama and other religious leaders and be-lievers. The new regimes, in contrast, were more centralizing and nation-alist, and they, like Ataturk, wanted to use the government to change theeconomy, whether calling their policies statism, socialism or somethingelse. To establish governmental power over society, it was necessary to
limit the power of the religious classes, including their ideologicalpower. Primarily Islamic ideologies were often abandoned in favour of nationalist ones, as had also happened in Turkey over time, or were refor-mulated as adjuncts to nationalism, as in the widespread modern for-mula ‘Arab-Islamic’, which privileges an Arab nationalist view of Islam.
Reza Shah (1925–41), like Ataturk, ruled a country that was formallyindependent, whereas in the Arab countries mentioned above there werevarious forms of foreign control, so that independent policies of secularnationalism could not be pursued until after World War II. Iran was a farless developed and more decentralized country than Turkey, and RezaShah’s first task was to build up an army and disarm potential separatists,especially nomadic tribes. Later he took a series of steps partly modelledon Ataturk’s, including imposed dress reform for both men andwomen—though stricter for women than in Turkey—the extension of state education, control of vaqfs, and an official ideology of nationalism,stressing the pre-Islamic periods and denigrating Arabs and, by implica-tion, Islam. Autocratic secular nationalism was continued by his son,Mohammad Reza (1941–79). In Iran, however, partly because it had
much less modern history of reform, modernization, and socio-economicchange than did Turkey and because the ulama was far stronger and moreindependent, there developed a larger backlash to secularization.
Here is not the place to give the story of the 1978–79 revolution except tosay that in many ways it has retained a number of secular features and hasnot meant a return to a traditional past. On the other hand, it expressed aphenomenon typical of the modern Middle East, which to some degreeexists also in the US and many other countries—the importance of ‘twocultures’, secular and religious; Western-oriented and traditionalist. In
Iran and the Middle East this split is largely tied to certain social classes —the popular classes and traditional bourgeoisie, on one side, and the newbourgeoisie and intellectuals, on the other. Iranian rule is now becomingmore pragmatic and secular despite continued religious pretensions, andit seems possible that the Islamic revolution will ultimately secularizelarger segments of society than it desecularizes—both those recoilingfrom government policies and those newly educated and participating inpublic life. This is suggested by the large majority achieved in the presi-dential elections of 1997 by the liberal cleric Khatami, followed by par-liament’s acceptance in August of a cabinet including moderates, with
men who had spoken out for greater freedoms in the key posts of Ministerof Interior and Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance.19
19 On the 1997 elections and cabinet, in addition to accounts in major newspapers, see theAugust 1997 analyses on the Internet by Gary G. Sick, ([email protected]). There is avast literature on Iran since Reza Shah, and only a few relevant works not cited elsewherein this article can be mentioned here: J.-P. Digard, B. Hourcade, and Y. Richard, L’Iran au
Gamal Abdel Nasser, like Ataturk and Reza Shah a man of militarybackground with goals of national independence and rapid modern-ization, also pushed Egypt further toward secularism via the path of growing state control over religion. This was shown especially in theexpansion of the ancient Islamic university, al-Azhar, to include secularsubjects and its increased control by the state. The Azhar sheikhs wereever-willing to issue decrees supporting government actions when
needed, rather in the manner of the leaders of various religions in theSoviet Union.
Syrian and Iraqi revolutionary leaders in recent decades have similarlyfollowed a path of nationalism, economic statism, and secularism. Thesecularism of Middle Eastern governments tended to better the positionof religious minorities, who had toleration but second-class status undertraditional Muslim law, and so minorities, including Shi’i Muslims incountries with Sunni majorities, have tended to favour secular govern-ments, even though the most secular of these governments were usuallyalso partly or wholly autocratic.20
Secular Government in India
In India, the position of minorities is crucial in explaining the secularismof the national movement and later the national government. Whilethere were several movements that stressed Hinduism or Islam in pre-partition India, the strongest national movement of the late nineteenthand early twentieth century was that of the secular Indian National
Congress. India had never been united with its contemporary borders,and Indian nationalism was essentially a creation of the anti-Britishstruggle. To create unity among India’s numerous castes and religions, anationality without religious or caste preference had to be created. TheCongress has always found it difficult to maintain this secularist balance,however; Mahatma Gandhi incorporated a number of Hindu beliefs andpractices into his programme, and the Congress provincial governmentsof the late 1930s often discriminated against Muslims, thus contribut-ing to the support of the movement for the creation of Pakistan. Morerecently secularist rulers of India have been accused of granting too much
to Muslims and to outcasts—to the latter by ‘affirmative action’ styleeducation and employment programmes, and to the former by allowingaspects of Muslim family law to be enforced in the Muslim community.21
XXe Siècle,Paris 1996; E. Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, Princeton 1982; SaidAmir Arjomand, The Turban for the Crown, New York 1988; Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs, revised ed., New York 1990; H.E. Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Religious
Modernism: The Liberation Movement in Iran under the Shah and Khomeini, Ithaca 1990; NikkiR. Keddie, Roots of Revolution, New Haven 1981. Recent events are thus far best covered inmajor newspapers and in magazines and journals.20 On the secularism of (particularly Shi’i) minorities, see Nikki R. Keddie, Iran and
the Muslim World , ch. 1o and Keddie, ‘The Shi’a of Pakistan’, Von Grunebaum CenterWorking Paper, Los Angeles 1993.21 On Indian communalism, see especially Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘Shadows of theSwastika’, Contention vol. 4, no. 2, Winter 1995; Daniel Gold, ‘Organized Hinduisms:From Vedic Truth to Hindu Nation’, in Martin E. Marty and Scott Appleby, eds,Fundamentalisms Observed , Chicago 1991; Sucheta Mazumdar, unpublished paper ongender and fundamentalism; Achin Vanaik, The Furies of Indian Communalism, Verso,London 1997.
However fragile Indian secularism has been, there seems no peacefulalternative in a country with about 100 million Muslims—more thanin Pakistan—and millions of Sikhs, not to mention other groups. Therise of militant Hindu nationalism or fundamentalism is a threat tonon-Hindus, and is paralleled by anti-secular fundamentalist move-ments in nearly all Muslim countries. All these movements suggest thattop-down, government-controlled secularism has not satisfied large
parts of their populations. In many of the countries discussed, after peri-ods when secular nationalist, sometimes socialist, oppositional ideolo-gies were popular, there is growing appeal of ideologies recommending areturn to religion.
What all these non-Western examples suggest is that the needs, first, of governmental self-strengthening and then of nationalist movements andstates were the primary factors in secularist policies, changes andachievements. Although some secularist intellectuals and secularizingsocial trends existed in most of these countries before secularism wasadopted by a twentieth-century movement or state, these were not themain forces in the decisions to adopt secularizing policies. In all theabove countries, secularism was tied to nationalism, to modernization,and to the centralization of control over politics, economic life, ideology,and society.
The above non-Western examples also indicate that actual policies fol-lowed by governments are often significantly either more or less secularthan are their ideologies. In contemporary Iran, for example, many poli-
cies are more secular than ideology indicates. What may be the mostresistant to change in such circumstances are the highly visible badgesof Islam, like veiling, which immediately leads everyone to think thisis an ‘Islamic’ state. On the other hand, recent eyewitness accounts in-dicate that even within this highly visible and symbolic sphere, with itstheoretical injunction to hide hair and body, women are increasinglybending the rules by uncovering some hair, wearing semi-transparentand stylish chadors, or wearing various forms of tribal or regional dress.In France, at the other extreme, official devotion to a ‘laic’ ideology leadsto official action against veiling in schools, while at the same time some
Islamic and other religious institutions get state subsidies. Iran exem-plifies states that are more secular than they claim, and France those thatare less so.
Even though this discussion has stressed examples from Asia, there is noclear or absolute line of demarcation regarding secularization from abovebetween Asia and Europe. Autocratic state-sponsored secularization as anecessary accompaniment of other aspects of modernization was as char-acteristic of Russia from Peter the Great through Stalin as it was of mod-ern Turkey or Iran.
Secularism in the West
The focus on secularism and nationalist centralizing government in non-Western countries raises the question of whether anything similar maybe discerned in the West. In virtually all countries that have experiencedsecularism we find, in different degrees, the three areas of secularism and
secularization that have been discussed in this article: intellectual, soci-etal and governmental-political. In non-Western areas, where modern-ization was often defensive and primarily state-sponsored, we findgovernment-sponsored or nationalist movement-sponsored seculariza-tion stronger and earlier than significant intellectual or societal secular-ization. In the West, although intellectual and societal secularizationhave generally been more significant than they are elsewhere, govern-
ment-sponsored secularization has been far more important than isusually recognized in works on secularism or secularization. Hence,while secularism is frequently traced to intellectual roots, in Locke andMill on toleration, or Voltaire and other Enlightenment figures whoattacked the Church and organized religion, it could equally be tracedto Henry viii, who confiscated monasteries and increased state con-trol of the church, to enlightened despots who sponsored power overthe Church, and certainly to the activities of the French Revolution,Napoleon, the new American republic, and increasingly secular Euro-pean governments. These governmental actions included measures of toleration such as the emancipation of the Jews—and of Catholics inProtestant countries and vice versa—and reduced privileges for themajority religion. All had a strong, often central, political and govern-mental element.
States that are growing in strength and that want to extend their con-trol to all who live within their borders have reasons to secularize,including the granting of relatively equal treatment to all religionsand building up a non-religious national ideology and symbols. In
older, less centralized, structures members of non-established religionscould be ignored, persecuted or allowed considerable autonomy. In moremodern states, however, with the growth of national markets, econ-omies, and cultures, governments wanted contented and essentiallyinterchangeable citizens of an increasingly unified state and society,which required that the rules of treatment be essentially uniform for dif-ferent groups.
In addition, modern states and their leaders want the primary loyalty of citizens to be to their state or nation, and help build up ideologies—if on
a lesser scale than in the non-Western or communist worlds—that stresssuch loyalty to the state and nation rather than the church. (Thoseembraced by the ‘nation’ usually came to mean those within its existingboundaries, sometimes with an irredentist addition of some beyond theboundaries, but never subtracting ethnic or religious groups that mightwant independence or unity with some other entity.) Nationalism, it hasbeen noted, is in part a modern substitute for religion, and as such itmust play down the role of religion in life, thought and government. Bythe seventeenth or eighteenth century, religious conflicts, whether in thereligious wars in Europe or in persecutions in US colonies, had come to be
seen as bloody, indecisive and inimical to national unity, so that it wasincreasingly felt best by governments to find a place for all religiousgroups. Modern states have tended to encourage nationalism irrespectiveof how strong this trend was among the general population or amongintellectuals—the two groups that scholars have tended to stress innationalism as in secularism. Nationalism or even national identity hasbeen shown to be weaker and to emerge later among the general popula-
tion than most scholars previously thought.22 Most national identitiesare secular—except when a church has been tied to a nationalist move-ment, as in Poland and Ireland—and nationalist ideologies are usuallysecularist in their effect. Furthermore, religious toleration, favoured bymost modern governments, is tied to a weakening of belief, as it is diffi-cult, if one is a true believer, also to believe that followers of false doc-trines should have the same freedoms and privileges as do the righteous.
Naturally, things are not quite this simple, or we would find many gov-ernments promoting atheism and taking radical steps against religion inorder to carry the discouragement of religious loyalties to its logical con-clusion. Instead, governments in power find it useful to be on goodterms with various religious institutions, once their wings are clipped,and there remained among rulers, as among many ‘enlightened’ intellec-tuals, the idea that the masses of the population should be religious tokeep them orderly. (This idea was, until the revival of fundamentalism,popular in the non-Western world. Several non-religious Iranians usedto tell me that it was good that the masses were religious as otherwisethey would become revolutionary!) Hence Western governments rarelygo all the way towards suppressing religion, promoting atheism, or thelike. There is a general liking by governments for moderate religionsthat can inculcate civic virtues, and a dislike only for radical ‘sects’, or‘foreign’ religions, like Islam in Western countries, that might threatenmilitancy or intrude on the old order.
Secularism and Fundamentalism
A comparison that concerns society more than the state has to do withorganized and politicized religious attacks on secularism which, likethe fundamentalisms that encourage such attacks, have in this centurythus far occurred chiefly in four parts of the world—the Muslim world,South Asia, Israel, and the US. They have not as yet been strong inEurope. There are not necessarily similar causes for these attacks in eachregion, but it is worth seeing if any comparisons can be made.
The US is often seen as needing secularism because it houses so many reli-
gious denominations, including several of fairly equal strength. Aftersome experience of repression in the colonial period by stronger denomi-nations, most states and then the federal government opted for freedomof religion. The first amendment to the US constitution, saying that‘Congress shall make no law’ for the establishment of religion or interfer-ing with the free exercise of religion followed many similar state laws,but these were not generally interpreted by state and federal govern-ments to mean the strict secularism that recent supreme court rulingshave tended to favour. The Bill of Rights was not intended to interferewith acts by state governments, and Congress only began to rule on free
speech questions in the states in the late 1920s, and on religious estab-lishment questions in the 1940s. The decision against prayer in theschools is as recent as 1962. In 1925, when the American Civil LibertiesUnion (ACLU) brought on the Scopes case to challenge a Tennessee law
22 For a striking study of one case, see Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Mod-ernization of Rural France 1870–1914, Stanford 1976.
forbidding the teaching of evolution, the Court had never ruled on reli-gious freedoms or free speech in the states. Although the first appealscourt’s reversal of Scopes’s conviction meant that the case, and hence theconstitutional issue, could not be appealed further, and the Tennesseelaw remained on the books for decades, the ACLU soon achieved some keySupreme Court rulings on Bill of Rights questions.23 Nearly all lawstouching free speech and religion were state and local laws, so the
Supreme Court’s agreement to rule on them was crucial.
This is the situation as summarized by Leonard Levy:
Those who framed and ratified the First Amendment meant thatthe establishment clause, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, shouldapply to the National Government only . . . According to theFourteenth Amendment [1868], no state may deprive any person of liberty without due process of law. The preponderance of evidencesuggests that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment neitherintended its provisions to incorporate any part of the Bill of Rightsnor to impose on the states the same limitations previously imposedon the United States only. However, the language of the FourteenthAmendment allowed for the possibility that the Constitution pre-vented the states, as well as the United States, from violating theFirst Amendment.24
By a rule known as the incorporation doctrine, the Fourteenth Amend-ment was said to incorporate First Amendment rights. In the 1947
Everson case, the court laid down principles it has generally stuck to—that aid to all religions was an illegal establishment of religion; and thatno tax can be used to support religious activities or institutions. Furtherdecisions have followed, and it is clear that the US now outlaws—asmany individual US states previously did—a number of practices com-mon in western Europe. On the other hand, the court’s rulings since1947 have been far more mixed and contradictory and less uniformlyfavourable to strict church-state separation than most people imagine.25
This mixed trend has thus far continued under the current court.
In the US there has been in the twentieth century ‘two cultures’, evenamong Christians. While certain ideas were held in common by themain Protestant churches through most of the nineteenth century,beginning at the end of the century there was a rapid development in onestream of various Protestant denominations away from biblical literalismand toward religious modernism, liberalism, and the social gospel. Thisgroup tended to secularism in their attitude toward both church-staterelations and everyday life. On the other hand, those who wanted to pre-serve old beliefs became more militant than they had ever been before.Their ideas included a group of Christian doctrines that in the early
twentieth century were named the Fundamentals. There now developeda schism between the traditionalists, who tended to have less modern
23 Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, ch. 4.24 Leonard Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment , New York1986, pp. 122–3.25 Ibid., pp. 162–3.
education, to be centred in the south and midwest, and to be morerural in origin, and the modernists and secularists, centred among thebetter-educated urban groups. There was some correlation betweenreligious denominations and degree of fundamentalism, but it was notcomplete.26
A Dialectical Conflict
Secularism and fundamentalism appear to have a dialectical relationshipwith one another in the US and elsewhere. The early development of modernism and secularism in the late nineteenth century was followedby a rise in fundamentalism, which was in large part a reaction to variousfacets of modernism and to rapid urbanization and socio-economicchanges and dislocations. A new wave of change, especially in civil rightsand sexual and family questions beginning in the 1960s, was followedby a new wave of fundamentalism beginning in the 1970s.
Such developments were far less sharp in Europe, for a variety of reasons.These included the much lower levels of religious belief and church affil-iation in Europe; to have a large body of fundamentalists it is necessary tohave a large body of believers, or, as in India and Israel, of believers inreligious nationalism (communalism). Also important are the weaknessin Europe, as compared to the US, of both the liberal to radical Protestantgroups that veered toward liberalism and modernism and especially of evangelical Christians, who tended toward fundamentalism. In polls andin church membership figures, the US has always been shown to be farhigher in both religious belief and church membership—including reg-
ular church attendance—than any western European country. Thismeans that what is probably the most secular of major Western countriesin its legal practice is also the most religious, whether this is measuredby church membership and attendance or by religious opinions.27 Eithergeneral widespread religious adherence, as in the US and much of theMuslim world, or exclusivist religious nationalism (communalism), as inSouth Asia or Israel/Palestine provide the necessary basis for large-scalefundamentalism, whether in the East or the West.28
26 See Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, ch. 4.27 A variety of poll data show religious belief, including belief in a number of ‘irrational’ideas like Creationism, and also church membership and attendance are far higher in theUS than in any other Western country. A Gallup poll in 1981 asking ‘Are you affiliatedwith a church or religious organization?’ got a 57 per cent positive response fromAmericans, as compared to 4 per cent of French, 5 per cent of Italians, 13 per cent of WestGermans, 15 per cent of Spaniards, and 22 per cent of the British. For the most completesurvey data on religion in America, see Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman, One
Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society, New York 1993; the Galluppoll is reported on p. 9.28 The similarities and differences between the areas characterized by religiosity and thosecharacterized by religious nationalism (communalism) are discussed in Nikki R. Keddie,
‘The New Religious Politics: Where, When, and Why do “Fundamentalisms” Appear?’forthcoming in Comparative Studies in Society and History. In that article I also proposereplacing the term ‘fundamentalism’, to which there are some valid objections, with ‘NewReligious Politics’ and the adjective ‘religio-political’, both defined for such discussionsas excluding predominantly liberal or socialist religious politics. I have not adopted thischange here, as it requires a lengthy explanation and justification. My own objections tothe term ‘fundamentalism’ are not strong enough to preclude my using it when it is stillthe only widely accepted common global term.
The dialectical relationship between the growth, first, of secularism andthen of fundamentalism appears dramatically in the non-Western world.Although this can be discussed only briefly, it appears that secular nation-alist governments, such as those of the Pahlavis, Bourguiba, and theCongress in India helped create a traditionalist-fundamentalist oppositionthat could point to the governments’ favouring of minorities and of Western ways and their undermining of religious traditions as ideological
points on which to build religious and political opposition movements.Governments that culturally modernized in a more modest fashion saw lessreligious opposition—true thus far of most governments in the Arabianpeninsula, for example. Governments in India also called forth religiousand political opposition especially focused on these governments’ ‘anti-Hindu’ favouring of minority religions and outcasts. Other factors alsofavour fundamentalist movements, including such socio-economic ones asthe rapid urbanization of more traditional and often marginal rural people,under-employment among the growing educated classes, and increasedincome inequality, and such political factors as resentments against theWestern powers, Israel, and a variety of government policies.
In the US, too, some of the upsurge of political fundamentalism is a re-sponse to state action, such as Supreme Court rulings on abortion or aspectsof sexuality. Yet state-encouraged secularization of thought has surely beengreater over time than has the religious backlash. State power and actionare not notable mainly for giving rise to religious reactions. Rather, thispaper makes three main points. First, the history of secularism and the spreador retreat of secular culture cannot be understood without a serious discus-sion of the role of the state and politics. Second, the role of state secularismis dialectically interrelated with other factors, such as economic change,which both allows states to centralize and secularize and encourages secu-larized states to launch further economic change. Social and intellectualchanges and perceptions of international and minority problems also oftenencourage—and recently may discourage—state secularization which inturn further affects those spheres. Third state secularization has on thewhole tended to increase the secularization of the population, even thoughthere has been a serious backlash under certain historical conditions.
This article has not seen states as the only important driving force behindsecularization, but says that the state and other political forces are moreimportant to secularization than is often stated. We should not be satis-fied either with sociological discussions that are limited to large imper-sonal trends or with overwhelmingly intellectual interpretations.29
28 This brief treatment of complex comparative issues is necessarily simplified. There is onlyspace to mention two further complexities: first, the state, like any institution, is not inde-pendent of intellectual and social forces that this article sees it as chiefly as acting upon, andthe complexities of these interrelationships can barely be suggested here. Second, the role of the state in encouraging both secularism and anti-secularism may have a counterpart in a
paradoxical role of religious politics in encouraging secularization. Some have suggested thatProtestantism, which first encouraged religiosity and even religious politics, was an inadver-tent cause of a later rise in secularism. And in contemporary Iran, religious politics has prob-ably increased secularism both from widespread disgust with the government and frombringing new groups and classes into a now essentially secular politics. Just as state secular-ism may bring a reaction, so too may state religiosity. These examples support the generalthesis of this article that secularism can only be understood with a comparative, dialectical,and comprehensive approach that includes the roles of politics and the state.
