This book is terrific for what it contains and disappointing for what it does not.
The volume's great value inheres in ten essays ranging from Mediterranean antiquity to the contemporary Middle East, analyzing in rigorous and convincing detail specific episodes in the history of “Religion and the Secular.” Two are of special significance: Anthony Grafton's fresh account of how the canons of professional scholarship were forged amid the quarrels of Protestant and Catholic writers in early modern Europe, and Peter E. Gordon's lucid pulling-apart of Max Weber's paradoxical enabling of the very religious sensibilities that Weber's own narrative of modernization appeared to render obsolete. These two brilliant essays are well worth the price of the volume.
Brad Gregory cogently elaborates an argument he has developed elsewhere over a number of years to the effect that the secularization generated by the Protestant Reformation has greatly weakened the cultures of our own time. Yaacob Dweck provides a fascinating picture of an evidence-focused seventeenth-century Hamburg rabbi who resisted the messianic enthusiasms of his contemporaries. Stefania Pastore and Caterina Pizzigoni recount cases of religious transformation in colonial Mexico and early modern Spain. Max Weiss and Qasim Zaman explore the dense complexities of state power and religious discourse in the Islamic Middle East of the last half-century. Peter Brown's discussion of Augustine and Victoria Smolkin's overview of the atheist-religion disputes in the Soviet Union draw extensively on each author's previously published work.
No collection of this kind can be expected to cover every relevant case and to explore every issue within its designated domain. Yet Formations of Belief ignores almost entirely—and offers no explanation in either Philip Nord's introduction or Katja Guenther's afterword—two elements that loom very large in the learned world's discussion of “Religion and the Secular.”
The first and most obvious absence is the theoretical and empirical defense of secularization theory. Nord's introduction bypasses this major presence in contemporary thought except for a single sentence mentioning Hans Blumenberg's argument of 1966 “that secular modernity is generative of an ethic of its own, that it is not the spiritual dead end it is supposed to be” (9). Nord is in thrall to the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor's famously melancholic acceptance of “our secular age” as a condition we have to put up with. Nord repeatedly cites Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Jose Casanova for their confident dismissal of historians and sociologists who still believe secularization is a real world-historical process and who refuse to evaluate it as a human disaster. Neither Nord's introduction nor Guenther's afterward mentions Steve Bruce or David Martin, who appear only in Gordon's footnotes. Gordon and Gregory are the only two contributors who display awareness of the multidisciplinary conversations found in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Modern Intellectual History, and elsewhere. Formations of Belief contains no reference to Callum G. Brown, Mark Chaves, Philip Kitcher, or David Voas.
No less surprising is the lack of any discussion of the United States. The first nation in the North Atlantic West to operate under a fully secular constitution has also been, by standard indicators, much more religious than other industrialized nations, including those where religion is supported by state power. Recently the scene of rapid and accelerating religious decline, the United States is now more central than ever to scholarly discussions of “religion and the secular.” Gregory alludes to the distinctive American case in occasional footnotes, but one cannot expect a specialist in Reformation Europe to carry this volume's engagement with one of the modern world's most conspicuous sites for the religion-secular dynamic. Nord alludes to the United States in a single footnote but says nothing about the highly salient contemporary work of K. Healan Gaston, Andrew Jewett, and David Sehat, or about the classic contributions of Thomas Luckmann, Martin Marty, and George Marsden.
Guenther's afterword exemplifies the odd choices that inform this collection. Apparently designed as a pulling-together of the volume's contributions, the afterword mentions only half of the essays! Guenther spends most of her time in a dubiously relevant excursus on neurotheology. This laboratory intensive effort to evaluate mystical experiences scientifically—scans searching for a “god spot” on the brain—has proved of limited value, Guenther concludes, since it merely reproduces the same theological divisions neurological research was designed to transcend.
The volume's most trenchant lines are found in Gordon's concluding reflections on the blind spots that “skepticism about secularism” has rendered widespread. “Critics of secularism do not often trouble themselves with the self-reflexive question as to whether their own critical practices are not conditioned by or even dependent upon the historical emergence of secularized forms of consciousness that only now have the epistemic privilege of turning back in skepticism upon their own pre-history.” These critics tend to forget that they are “children of the Enlightenment.” Today's pushback against secularism has produced an ostensibly wise “melancholy,” Gordon warns, “that forbids us from thinking through religion as a historical form with its own distinctive patterns of domination and occlusion” (201).
