After more than a century of framing theoretical work in the social sciences and humanities, the concepts “secular,” “secularism,” and “secularization” have lately become the focus of intense critical attention. The debates and theoretical reconfiguration this attention has occasioned center on three basic claims. First, given what to many appears to be a worldwide resurgence of religion, the “secularization thesis” is no longer adequate. Second, contrary to liberalism's vision of it as a neutral discursive space that allows (or requires) people to transcend their religious identities in order to share a “public” discourse, the “secular” should be reconceived as a positive cultural formation grounded in particular metaphysical, epistemological, and normative claims. As such, and third, the “religious” and the “secular” have been mutually constitutive in the modern period and in various ways — political, legal, and cultural — the secular has worked to police “religion” and religions.

It is especially with respect to this third point that Matthew Scherer's book, Beyond Church and State: Democracy, Secularism, and Conversion, makes its thoughtful and productive contribution. Scherer argues that secularism has less to do with separating church and state or, more generally, religion and politics, than with a particular trajectory of mutual transformation, that is, a “conversion,” of religion and politics. The book usefully complicates the view of our so-called “secular age” by analyzing the concept, figure, and narrative workings of “conversion” to distinguish an “authorized” figure of conversion that we find on the surface of classic conversion narratives such as Paul's and Augustine's from a deeper, more complex “crystalline conversion” that Scherer finds underlying these narratives. This distinction, he argues, should be brought to bear on the story of the secular, so often told in terms of a clean break — like that between Paul's “old man” and “new man” — between a religious pre-modernity and a secular modernity. To do so is to see modern secularism as “both divided from a religious past and yet also locked in continuous and shifting patterns of interrelation with religion in the present” (63). Neither Hans Blumenberg's “legitimacy” nor Carl Schmitt's “secularized” theology will do. Instead, as Scherer says of Augustine's Confessions in the first chapter of the book, we need to think “a continuous process through which the past is conserved in the present, and the future is rendered indeterminate” (45), where “the old man is forever departing and the new man always arriving” (55).

After the opening chapter on Augustine, Scherer devotes each of the remaining chapters of the book to single modern thinkers. In Chapters 2 and 4, Scherer reads John Locke and John Rawls to show that beneath the surface of their liberal secularism, we find a more complex settlement between religion and politics. In Chapters 3 and 5, Scherer reads Henri Bergson and Stanley Cavell as critics of liberal secularism who provide conceptual resources for thinking about crystalline conversion. One might ask whether the concept of “saint” bears too much weight in Scherer's analysis of Rawls or whether the chapter on Bergson is sharply enough focused. Taken together, however, the chapters do a good job illuminating and defending Scherer's claims about crystalline conversion and laying the groundwork for his engagement, in the conclusion, with Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Though Taylor also rejects simplistic notions of the separation between religion and politics, Scherer argues that he remains caught up in an authorized conversion narrative — a shift from a premodern, naïve faith to a more lucid, self-aware, “fragilized” faith — and through this narrative, reduces religion to “belief.” Consequently, even as Taylor recognizes the explosion of different forms of religion and quasi-religion that become possible with modernity — a “supernova,” in Taylor's telling — he privileges this reflective form of faith in a way that precludes a robust engagement with forms of religion not compatible with this protestantized “religion.” The crystalline model, Scherer contends, shows secularism as a site where a variety of religious and political practices mutually shape and reshape one another, a still expanding supernova that consists of many “faiths, traditions, and practices — naïve, reflective, evangelical reformed, orthodox, reconstructed, secular, lay, clerical, atheist, pantheist, animist and so forth ad infinitum” (231). In other words, it opens us to what Scherer's teacher William Connolly calls a “deep and multidimensional pluralism” that shows promise for revitalizing genuine democracy.

I suspect there is room for significant debate about Scherer's reading of Taylor. The word belief does play a major role in A Secular Age, but one well might question whether for Taylor it carries the reductive force that Scherer claims. It is more productive to say that Taylor weaves a theological argument throughout his masterful social and historical analysis of the secular age and that Scherer employs “crystalline conversion” to contribute not only to the nuanced empirical study of the transformations and relations between religion and politics, but also to the renewal of pluralism and democracy — a political agenda. Yet, Scherer's book also teaches us to be suspicious of easy distinctions between the theological and the political (and even, perhaps, between the theological and political, on the one hand, and the “academic,” on the other). Beyond Church and State is a work of political, social, and religious criticism that not only analyzes secularism, but exemplifies Scherer's claim that secularism is “not a formation separate from religion [or] constituted through its difference from religion” (215). In other words, we find here an instance of what the philosopher Hent de Vries calls “breaking back through” to religion: the redeployment of religious concepts — here “conversion” — to redirect the critical force of modern thought by reading the “secular” through the “religious.” As Scherer puts it, it is “one way of drawing on the resources of ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’ traditions to rethink problematic categories of ‘the political’” (4). Such a reading exposes more clearly the complex interweaving of the religious, political, and critical and helps to reorient the way we might imagine these formations and their related institutions in the future.