Postsecularism, reason, and violence

The term ‘postsecularism’ appears to have been coined in the 1960s by Andrew Greeley, but it was undoubtedly Jürgen Habermas who did most to popularize it, around the turn of the twenty-first century. As developed by Habermas, the postsecular involves the idea that religious convictions and claims may not only persist or gain new strength in secular environments, but may also be considered reasonable by secular actors if they accept the rules and procedures of the secular nation-state. Increasingly, however, one witnesses religious positions and movements that do not simply demand recognition within and from a secular environment, but openly reject the very concepts or values of (gendered) morality, life, law, and reason on which modern secular Western societies rest. Arguably, it has been the increasingly visible assertive presence of Muslim population groups in Europe and America, and the dramatic appearance of both state and non-state Islamic actors on the world political stage, rather than the continuing or renewed self-confidence of Catholic and evangelical Christian demands (let alone Hindu nationalism in India, neo-Confucianism in China, or the Orthodox Christian revival in Eastern Europe), which have most visibly posed a challenge to theoretical debates on the role of religion in the public sphere—that is, on questions of secularism and postsecularism. Hence, as illustrations, I will briefly discuss two forms of contemporary Islam, namely, quietist Salafism and potentially violent Salafi-jihadism.