Ever since Habermas resurrected the term post-secular, it has become a keyword in academic discussions regarding the resilience of religion and its implications for liberal and democratic rule. However, the post-secular has quickly become a subject of disagreement, with scholarly deployments of the term ranging from purely descriptive to fully normative. Transformations of Religion and the Public Sphere: Postsecular Publics is not an attempt to settle these debates. While the volume's editors acknowledge that the post-secular characterizes contemporary discursive and material conditions, they do not endeavor to provide a univocal and synthetic account of its convoluted and multi-layered nature. Rather, as Braidotti metaphorically observes, the book should be read as a necessarily incomplete cartography of the post-secular, a plural exploration which takes issue with the myth of secularism and reveals important elements of the current social and political context, mainly in Europe.
In the book, the post-secular is considered a “diverse, multicultural, and internally differentiated” condition (4), related to the ineradicable infusion of spirituality into the whole of human life. As such, the post-secular represents as much a challenge as an opportunity — an ambiguous quality that is systematically explored in the volume. While the post-secular condition, in its manifold manifestations, unsettles the domains of reason and politics by problematizing the secular-religious dichotomy that underpins Western modernity, the volume's contributors take advantage of the creative potential of this problematization to revisit old, and reveal new, modes of critical inquiry and political governance.
In accordance with this pluralistic approach, the chapters are highly diverse. Contributors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and adopt different theoretical and methodological perspectives. Nevertheless, the editors managed to forge a consistent narrative throughout the book. Such cohesion, often difficult to attain in edited volumes, is achieved in two ways: first, the contributors adopt similar starting points; second, they apparently share at least one political objective — to unearth the inclusive and democratic potential of the post-secular. Whereas the latter objective is not explicitly stated, the starting points are clearly specified in the introduction. The editors begin with a critique of the modern myth of secularism and the ways in which it dichotomizes reality, a recognition of the ineluctable influence of religion in the public sphere and, moreover, a disavowal of the oft-heard connections between secularism–emancipation and secularism–Christianity. Building upon and elaborating this critique of secularism, most contributors also attempt to reveal or devise new ways of promoting multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist ideals.
These goals are pursued in thirteen rich and demanding chapters. Although it is sometimes difficult to discern the structure of the book, the chapters flow smoothly from one another. The initial chapters by Tariq Modood, Anders Berg-Soresen, and Ernst van den Hemel provide context by addressing the post-secular condition and its implications in Western Europe. They investigate discursive and institutional responses to this condition, highlighting different strategies adopted by political actors. Whereas Modood identifies instances of religious accommodation in the workings of moderate secularism, Berg-Sorensen and van den Hemel note the emergence of exclusionary political practices, in the form of rehabilitating the Enlightenment critique of religion and of rediscovering the Judeo-Christian roots of the West.
The next three contributions turn to philosophy — without, however, losing touch with reality. In examining the Muhammed cartoon affair, Christoph Baumgartner highlights limitations in the Habermasian ethics of citizenship, noting that liberal conceptions of competent citizens may disavow and, thus exclude, Muslim voices from democratic deliberations. Likewise, William Egginton criticizes liberalism, but focuses on that strand of the tradition that pits religion against freedom and democracy. According to Egginton, the putative enemy of freedom — religious fundamentalism — is in fact nurtured by the capitalist system of exclusion, which is partly underpinned by liberal thinking. Gregg Lambert, too, explores the post-secular in philosophical thought, arguing that the return of the figure of Saint Paul in current writings reflects an apparent crisis in philosophy, the subject of which can no longer be grounded on a scientific notion of reason.
The remainder of the book examines the post-secular in relation to identity politics, underscoring both positive and problematic intersections of religious identities with racial, postcolonial, and feminist struggles. In addition to criticizing the complicity of secularism with racist, colonial and patriarchal politics, the contributors demonstrate that democratic perspectives and emancipatory struggles are not necessarily secular. While both sets of co-authors examine the role of media in discourses and practices concerning religion, Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley are critical of “transgressive communicative acts” (135), such as the provocative Innocence of the Muslims, for turning religion into an exclusionary racial signifier, and Koen Leurs and Sandra Ponzanesi show how the digital realm provides an open arena for Moroccan-Dutch youth to contest and reconstruct stereotypical notions of Islam, secularism, and integration.
Studying the encounter of the First Nations and Christian missionaries in British Columbia, Pamela Klassen demonstrates that both secular and religious mentalities have been involved in the consolidation of Canadian territorial sovereignty. She argues that the post-secular, understood as a context in which diverse mentalities and material practices meet and interact, is not exclusively contemporary and may, thus, be reimagined differently. Patrick Eisenlohr addresses another non-European case: the secular governance of Muslim minorities in Mauritius and Mumbai. His provocative analysis identifies the entanglement of religious activism — a hallmark of the post-secular — and the governmental promotion of religious orthodoxy for the purpose of forming good and productive citizens, that is, in pursuit of a secular mode of governance.
Eva Midden takes issue with the secular bias of feminist approaches, especially in light of the startling, yet growing usage of feminist ideas by conservative and Islamophobic actors. By considering the situated knowledge of religious women active in grass-root organizations, she turns the relationship between religion and emancipation on its head, showing that there are pluralist and inclusive alternatives to secular feminism. Anne-Marie Korte also destabilizes secular-religious demarcations and their intersection with gender. She investigates Madonna's crucifixion performance and other “blasphemous” feminist artworks, demonstrating that their contestability is inseparable from contemporary identity politics. In the final chapter, Rosi Braidotti opens yet another line of inquiry: the residual spirituality of critical theory, which she explores by looking into post-secular subjectivity. Promoting an idea of the political that is affective and affirmative rather than oppositional and negative, Braidotti's exploration works well as the post-face of a volume whose authors have dared to reformulate an unsettling condition as a potentially inclusive opportunity in societies that are not strictly secular.
Transformations is a timely and important book that invites readers not only to reflect critically on, but also to engage creatively with, contemporary political and material conditions. It is an invitation to consider alternative ways of investigating and managing political realities, especially in critical theory and emancipatory politics. This commitment to both critique and creativity is its most important contribution. Although two of the thirteen chapters examine non-European contexts, the geographical scope of the book is mainly European. This focus does not help to overcome the Eurocentrism of the Habermasian conceptualization of the post-secular, which is criticized in the introduction. Moreover, although the book calls for the respect and inclusion of religion, this commitment to democratic ideals is conveyed in a language that may be inaccessible to lay readers. While Transformations may not appeal to a wider public, it lays groundwork for a new phase of research on secularism, one that draws on critiques of this doctrine to propose alternative ways of being secular and religious in a post-secular world.
