Secularism: Conceptual Genealogy or Political Dilemma?

If we step back and consider the words around which critiques and debates have crystallized in recent years, some have been relatively clear, while others have been constantly in need of disambiguation. Even during the most drawn-out of debates over “nationalism” or “revolution,” and despite the arguments over definitions and typologies, we had the sense that we were all talking about the same thing—that is why the debates could move along, adding new perspectives, disputing whether this or that author had placed enough stress on class position, or industrialization, or ideas. Such is not the case with “secularism.” To begin with, there are a number of words to choose from: you can write about “secularism,” “the secular,” “secularity,” or “secularization,” or about several at once. You can stick to a French word or a Turkish one, refusing translation. (Indeed, I have done that.) Although one might think that having a number of distinct terms would help us disambiguate their meanings, such does not seem to have been the happy result. Years after a considerable literature began to accumulate on the topic, one has only to glance at a sample of recent books and articles to see that their authors feel the need to begin by defining and distinguishing. I think that we do this because we often are discussing not different aspects of the same object—how beliefs, practices, and political arrangements change with respect to one another—but rather quite different types of objects. Failing to understand this, we talk past one another, or slip from studying one object to discussing another. More precisely, I think that we have built up quite impressive bodies of work about two different things: about, on the one hand, a set of historical processes that characterize the modern age (at least for some of the world) and, on the