Secularism, Liberalism and the Problem of Tolerance: the case of the USA

Draft version/ “Conference on Migration, Religion and Secularism”

Adam B. Seligman

I think it is probably most useful to begin with the recognition that the religion/secular

dichotomy is not a particularly helpful one to use as we struggle to understand the

challenges of social life in our contemporary world. We tend to use the concepts of

religion and secularity or secular culture or secularization as if these were objective,

universal and value-free concepts that can be used to characterize aspects of shared social

life that are not religious. Religion and religious too are used as universal, objective and

value-free concepts.

I believe this approach is fundamentally flawed. I think rather that both religion and

secularism are concepts that developed in a very particular and Christian context, can be

used, helpfully, to describe aspects and periods in the coming to be of Christian

civilization – but do not actually serve us well when we come to discuss, analyze and

understand other traditional civilizations or other civilizations within which tradition is

changing and being re-negotiated.1 What for example is a secular Jew? What of a Jew

who observes no commandments, goes to synagogue only on Yom Kippur and does not

otherwise maintain any traditional practices? Is he secular, or partially religious or what?

How do we characterize China and 1.3 billion Chinese? Ingelhart has called China the

most secular country in the world. But look at the proliferation of spirit cults and other

forms of worship. Surely this is not secular in any usual sense of the term. More

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importantly for this conference perhaps, what of the case of Islam? What of the

individual or community whose observance of traditional commandments are partial, or

almost non-existent? What of the Moslem who eats during Ramadan – but only in

private, in hiding, away from communal eyes? Is he secular or hypocritical? What of she

who does not eat during Ramadan but does drink wine occasionally? What of those

communities in Central Asia who celebrate the Id, by drinking vodka? Are these people

secularists or sinners or ignorant? Or are they as are so many, engaged in the never

ending movements, interpretation and transformation of their tradition that is, always

continually being negotiated and negotiated anew by communities and individuals over

the course of time.

I would in fact claim that secularism is a very particular moment in the Christian process

of negotiation of its own tradition – as was the Protestant Reformation and as is the

phenomenon of Christian fundamentalism. All particular moments in the way the

concrete practice of tradition mediates, transforms and negotiates the tradition of

practices that define any civilizational endeavor. That a particular moment of this

negotiation in Christianity is understood in terms of secularism has much to do with the

privileging of belief over practice, of faith over works and of innerlischkeit over external

practice that has been part of Christianity from its origins (as evinced in its rejection of

Jewish Law and its unique allegorical way of reading and interpreting scripture) and

which received particular emphasis during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century.

Secularism as unbelief is thus the complement of tradition understood primarily in terms

of belief rather than practice. The consequent use – I would say, misuse, of this term – to

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characterize other civilizational endeavors, the Jewish, the Islamic, the Hindu, etc. is

simply the spoils of war as it were: a consequent of the power differentials between the

Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Indian and Chinese civilizations. Indeed, as I have already

hinted at: I would much prefer to replace the dichotomy of religion/secular with that of

tradition of practices/practice of tradition – as being more structural, less particularistic,

historicist and Whiggish a way of conceptualizing what is usually understood as the

dichotomy between religious and secular individuals, cultures and communities.

I preface my much more concrete remarks with these broader methodological reflections

because they bear great relevance to the general themes of this conference which after all

deals with religion and secularism in a comparative perspective.

Europe we recall is the “secular” exception in a world that is overwhelmingly “religious”.

Or, in the terms I am offering here, European civilization is one where traditional

practices have been most abandoned and rejected: A fact that can be ascertained by

visiting any of Churches of Europe and calculating the average of age of those in

attendance on any given Sunday. Moreover, this rejection of tradition is intimately tied

up with the overwhelming terms of collective identity. In fact both phenomena may well

be related. The Peace of Westphalia and the concept of cuius regio eius religio may be

central here. Europe which was Christian became rather a continent of nation-states and

in different ways traditional practices were subsumed within new national identities.

However we wish to develop this model vis a via Europe, and I think it could be useful to

do so, the subject of my paper pertains to America and what because the USA.

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Now the USA may well be, as S.M. Lipset claimed the “first new nation”; but it is also a

nation where certain sectarian Protestant assumptions on self and society were allowed to

develop relatively free of the effects of the Counter-Reformation and in general of the

need to take into consideration the existence of the Catholic Church. That grand debate

(often violent to be sure) over the terms of Christian tradition that defined the Protestant

Reformation and the Counter-Reformation in Continental Europe – and which eventuated

in the development of secular polities and societies there; was, to a great extent ignored

in the New World and played but a minor role in the later history of the United States.

There was no ultra-montane party in 19th century American politics, nor was there a State

Church as in Sweden, nor was there a religious requirement for full citizenship rights.

All of which does not mean that the USA was, or is, secular. Or rather it means that it

was secular in the classical, circumscribed and medieval usage of the terms – referring to

that area of public life that is outside sacerdotal regulation and ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Secularism then, in the USA, may be understood asa constitutional principle rather than

as a moral position. Moreover and as Alessandro Ferrari has noted, this is a critical

distinction to keep in mind when we come to understand the role of religion in public life,

within different social contexts.

What the Protestant sectaries brought to – and imposed on – the new polity they

established in the New World was a particular institutional frame that not only permitted

but even encouraged the freedom of conscience as a political right. This freedom of

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conscience however was not conceived of as rooted in anything other than certain

fundamental aspects of Protestant belief (recall the unique character of these sectarian

Protestants was precisely in their rejection of “works”, that is, their rejection of all

traditions of practice and almost total replacement by the “workings of grace in the soul.”

That the very institutionalization of the settlement and later the polity would necessitate a

certain mediation of this radical position is of course also the case).

This freedom of conscience, which has been referred to as the very first “ political right”,

perhaps today we would say the very first “human right” has been, almost from the

beginning of Protestant settlement in North America of almost indescribable significance.

In fact, and at least within the context of American history, it illustrates just how indebted

modern ideas of individual right are to religious principles. It in fact illustrates what can

be termed the interweaving of religious and secular dimensions that came to characterize

the reconstruction of natural law doctrines in eighteenth century America . This

development was analyzed by German legal scholar and sociologist, George Jellinek, in

the 19th century. Already in 1895, Jellinek compared the America Bill(s) of Rights (from

different states), the French Declaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen and, more

significantly, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, and

the 1628 Petition of Right. His conclusions are worth quoting:

The American bills of rights do not attempt merely to set forth certain principles

for the state’s organization, but they seek above all to draw the boundary line

between state and individual. According to them the individual is not the

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possessor of rights through the state, but by his own nature he has inalienable and

indefeasible rights. The English laws know nothing of this. They do not wish to

recognize an eternal, natural right, but one inherited from their fathers, “the old,

undoubted rights of the English people.”2

As Jellinek sees it, English law offers no autonomous grounding of individual rights in a

set of natural principles but grounds them solely in tradition, in “the laws and statutes of

this realm.”3 Jellinek however looked to the defining traits of Congregational Puritanism

to explain how the “inherited rights and liberties, as well as the privileges of organization,

which had been granted the colonists by the English kings” became transformed in the

New World to “rights which spring not from man but from God and Nature.”4

The very success of natural law doctrine - - based on self-sufficient individuals endowed

with reason - - as the foundation of the American political community rested on the

synthesis of these ideas with the tradition of the Holy Commonwealth of visible saints,

the transcendent subject of Protestant belief. Not only (transcendental) reason but also

(transcendent) grace, redefined in the inner-worldly terms of individual conscience,

continued throughout the eighteenth century to define the terms of individual and social

existence in the civil polity. It was the very continuity of this religious heritage that made

the positing of a political community of individuals - - united by compacts - - possible in

eighteenth century America and beyond. And so Jellinek concluded:

In the closest connection with the great religious political movement out of which

the American democracy was born, there arose the conviction that there exists a

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right not conferred upon the citizen but inherent in man, that acts of conscience

and expressions of religious conviction stand inviolable over against the state as

the exercise of a higher right. This right so long suppressed is not ‘inheritance,’ is

nothing handed down from their fathers, as the rights and liberties of Magna

Charta and of the other English enactments, - - not the State but the Gospel

proclaimed it. 5

As Jellinek realized, individual rights in America were not derived solely from positive

law, but had acquired a transcendent justification unique in the modern world.

Now there is an interesting story to be told – and one that Jellinek glosses over – on just

how “grace” and “the Gospel” proclaim these rights. The particular forms of theological

controversy that became dominant by the early 18th century in New England saw the

political need for a moral community based on natural law where religion was both

central but separate from State power.6 As we all know from the vast amount of

published material on the public discussions and pamphlets leading up the revolution the

issues of compacts, natural law and the constitution of a political community, as a

community of virtue were debated at great length.

Within these debates Locke’s philosophy of natural law played a central role – arguably

more central than in his home country or indeed anywhere else.7 And Locke, we recall,

presented a rational account of both the existence of natural law as well as of its binding

obligation. This later – the binding obligation to follow natural law - especially as

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interpreted by such Puritan divines as Elisha Williams was achieved through man’s

rational and uncoerced acceptance of the dictates of the Christian religion. 8Natural rights

came to be understood as being derived from the fundamental duties imposed on man by

natural law to maintain himself as a moral agent. Morality (the most meaningful form of

agency) was predicated on freedom, especially on freedom of the will.

Freedom of the will, liberty, was therefore central to the whole construct of natural rights,

for only a will and a conscience free of coercion could rationally ascertain the truths of

natural law. At the same time however, religion was central to the political community

for it provided the necessary realm of virtue wherein which such reason could develop.

If, in the 17th century, the religious community provided the realm for the workings of

grace – that arena wherein the will of a man could be “quickened” to accept the

undeserved workings of grace; in the 18th century that same community provided the

arena wherein his reason could be so “quickened” to accept the obligations of natural

law.

Hence we find George Washington, in his farewell address in 1796 asserting that:9

Of all the disposition and habits which lead to political prosperity Religion and

morality are indispensable supports. A volume could not trace all their

connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked where is the

security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation

desert the Oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice?

And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained

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without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education

on the minds of peculiar structure – reason and experience both forbid us to

expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Thomas Jefferson we recall, authored not only the Virginia Bill for Establishing

Religious Freedom but also the Bill for Punishing Disturbers of Religious Worship and

Sabbath Breakers. It was, recalling Washington, a “National morality”, that is to say, the

very community of virtue whose birth America was to presage, which was at stake in the

maintenance of both religion and religious freedom.10

So much then for the background to Jellinek’s important insight into the nature of rights

and most centrally of the right to freedom of conscience in the USA. What we should

attempt now is a more critical investigation into the contemporary derivatives of this

orientation in a world of multicultural citizenship, gay marriage, and religious pluralism –

that is for the politics of liberalism.

We have seen that individual rights and most especially the freedom of conscience and

the consequent distinction between public and private realms is ensconced in American

liberalism as a fundamental right. It is a right however, that draws its legitimacy from a

set of religious precepts and orientations, decidedly not from the idea of the individual as

autonomous moral actor. This then has led to a serious misunderstanding as to the bases

of liberalism in the USA. On the one hand, and for many secular liberals (and many

supporters of the Democratic Party in the USA) liberalism implies the politics of rights

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rather than of the good, a secularized public sphere, the privatization of religion and the

view of the self as autonomous moral agent working out his or her visions of the good

within a set of rules that protects the rights of the other members of society. If there is

any notion of “the good” in this politics it is the very idea of moral autonomy as at the

basis of liberal politics.

On the other hand, there is a wholly different strain of American liberalism – that goes

under the name of conservatism, that very definitely supports the freedom of conscience

and of belief – but out of a very different set of principles, in fact out of the very religious

convictions that motivated Elisha Williams and other 18th century divines. And for these

conservatives, the individual moral agent is not autonomous, but subnomous, that is,

under divine injunctions, the public realm should be open to religious interventions and

politics is not about individual rights, but very much about very particular ideas of the

good. This is the so called moral-high ground that, according to many has been seceded

to the right-wing of the Republic party by Democrats and other liberals.

Given these very different notions of the social and political order, what I would like to

claim is essential to the actual workings of that order has been the definition of a realm of

privacy in the USA understood as a realm of principled indifference where inquiries into

the constitutive nature of the individual, agency and action are not countenanced.

Indifference comes in many forms, most often as what may be termed the aesthetization

of difference (differences are a matter of tastes, not morals, and as there is no accounting

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for tastes, no real tolerance of difference is called for, rather a recognition of each

individual’s “right” to their own opinion). The aesthetization of difference is often

accompanied by a trivialization of difference. Here the differences or the arenas of

difference are not deemed important enough to merit a principled tolerance. Your rather

poor taste in neckties is not something which demands of me a tolerant attitude though I

find them both offensive and in bad taste. Precisely because they are a matter of taste

(aesthetics) and of no great significance (trivial) tolerance does not effectively enter the

picture.

These moves, of making difference a matter of aesthetics or trivializing it, are of course

ways to avoid having to engage with difference. By trivializing what is different one

makes a claim to the essential similarity or sameness of the non-trivial aspects of

selfhood and shared meaning. What makes us the same (as Jews, Episcopalians,

Armenians or radical feminists) is much more essential to our definitions of who we are

than what divides us (your horrendous taste in bathroom fixtures). This is a form of

denying difference rather than engaging with it. And we do it all the time, it is of the very

stuff of our social life. As well know all too well, it also has its limits (in for example,

issues over gay rights, abortion and so on).

In a certain sense, and as most often practiced in daily life, such denial of difference

(relegating it to the aesthetic or trivial) is itself a form of indifference towards what is

other and different. By framing our difference from alter’s position or action in terms of

tastes or the trivial we are not forced to engage with it and can maintain an attitude of

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indifference. Thus, as a liberal of the first variety, I may find your religious beliefs

foolish and your sexual appetites objectionable but neither are illegal nor hurtful to

others. They do not effect me in my relations to you (as, say, member of the same

university department) and so, in the long run, are a matter of indifference to me. They

are your private concern. Not surprisingly, that freedom of conscience which we

discussed earlier and which, as we have seen was, in fact the freedom of religion – went

hand in hand with its privatization.

The privatization of religion was of course part of a larger politics, perhaps even a

political theology which have become the hallmarks of a liberal American vision of

modernity. And of course here precisely is the rub. For accepting these principles

essentially means accepting either, a liberal/secular version of selfhood and society that

is not shared across the globe and across human civilizations – or, in the second sense

above, an explicitly Protestant vision of human existence in the world – which is

certainly not shared. Please recall here my earlier strictures about our very categories of

religion and secularism. These are Christian, I would even say, Protestant categories and

we must be very careful about presenting them as universal human experiences.

Moreover, and as we witness daily in the contested politics of the USA, struggles over

abortion, over gay marriage and most recently over the Sciavo case (where the Governor

of Florida sent State law enforcement officials to forcibly seize a dying woman from a

hospice to administer life-support systems – a move that threatened the very rule of law)

all revolve on the issue of autonomous versus subnomous conceptions of personhood and

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their implications for the public realm. These are not minor issues, they will effect life in

the USA, and through American military power, in many parts of the world, for years to

come.

For, it is precisely the construction of the shared public realm that is at the center of all of

these conflicts. Principled indifference is, as we have said, fine as far as it goes. But a

basis of shared empathy and, what sociologists would call, generalized trust, must

nevertheless be maintained for society itself to exist. And this brings us to the problem of

tolerance. Most pointedly to the question of how much difference can be tolerated in a

public sphere that is nevertheless one of shared empathy and generalized trust. I

purposely use the much maligned word tolerance, fully aware of its negative associations.

I insist on its use, for I fear most demands to go beyond tolerance to a real engagement

with constitutive difference end up being at their core hypocritical – claiming a pluralist

purpose, but often reducing the truly other to but a version of oneself. Or else excoriating

it as beyond the boundaries of what can be countenanced in a shared social world. This is

precisely the problem of so much contemporary politics. Liberal indifference has not

provided a helpful propaedeutic to live with what is truly different. And I include here

both forms of liberalism noted above.

For the liberal distinction between public and private realms, is a distinction in realms and

types of toleration - certain beliefs and/or practices are deemed private and so beyond the

realm of what even enter a calculus of tolerance. For one has no right to intervene in private

matters, or even to judge them. In this reading, all conflicting views are reduced to an almost

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aesthetic realm of different matters of taste (or as the current popular imagery has it of life-

styles - as they say so tellingly in the USA "different strokes for different folks"). Up until a

certain point this can serve as a form of social etiquette, but not as a legal basis for a shared

life. And in fact, continually shunting off difference into the private realm, difference is

ignored, rather than dealt with in any meaningful way. Hence, when real difference, not over

neckties, but over gay marriage for example arises – it threatens to become a constitutional

issue.

I hasten to add that the problems of dealing with constitutive difference in the public sphere

are, of course, not unique to the USA. Nor is the “liberal” or perhaps liberal-individualist

solution unique to that social formation, but in fact defines modern societies in one form or

another, though with important variations. Recall, for example, the classical

enlightenment response to “the Jewish Question”, that given by Count Stanislav de

Clermont-Tonnerre in 1789: “We must refuse everything to the Jew as a nation and

accord everything to the Jew as an individual”11. This became perhaps the paradigm

statement of attitudes toward the other – his and her constitution solely as individual

entities rather than as members of corporate groups. Article I of the Declaration of the

Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 26, 1789) of the French National Assembly

states: “All men are born and remain free and equal in rights: social distinctions can not

be found but on common utility”. This is a total reconfiguration of the meaning of

identity along the lines of utility functions rather than what may be termed constituted

selves

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Within the public sphere, boundaries are, in these societies, parsed into razor thin edges

and individuals interact not as members of groups, but as bearers of rights (citizen right,

social rights, human rights and so on). Group identities have been, in the public sphere,

replaced by individual identities and the problem of tolerance of difference has been

replaced by the legal recognition and entitlements of rights. As we can see, modernity

has elided the problem of tolerance, obviated the necessity to be tolerant, rather than

make people tolerant. It has replaced tolerance with rights, if in Europe, without the

religious (and specifically Protestant) baggage that was the case in the USA.

In both Europe and the USA however a fundamental problem remains. For rights do not

provide recognition. And recognition - as political philosophers from Adam Ferguson to

G.W.H. Hegel and down to our own contemporaries have reminded us - is the core of

modern politics.12 And indeed new and old forms of group based identity arise, to again

make vocal and public demands for recognition. And this in fact is the social

significance of such holidays as Kwanza, or of a Boston Rabbi lighting a Chanukah

menorah on Boston Common, or a French Rabbi on the Champs de Mars for that matter.

All betray the demand for recognition, for a recovering of one’s identity. And demanding

public recognition for it. Not surprisingly, these demands are most often framed

religiously. This is the case not only over prayer in school or placing the ten

commandments in front an Alabama court-house. It is in fact not surprising that in

contemporary America the struggle over identity, community, class and status (i.e. over

recognition) often takes the form of a struggle over religious symbols.

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This is as true in Europe as in the USA. The recent French ruling over the head scarf, the

debates over the preamble to the European constitution – if it should refer to a shared

Christian heritage - and if I may recall some examples anti-Muslim activity in Italy - all

point to this phenomenon. In Lodi, in northern Italy, for example on October 15th 2000,

the local Catholic inhabitants desecrated a site upon which a mosque was to be built by

pouring pig urine all around it.13 The idea was that by rendering the site impure they

would be able to stop the mosque from being built. On hearing of this one’s immediate

association is the construction of a Moslem graveyard opposite the Dung Gate of

Jerusalem to prevent the Jewish Messiah from appearing: as he would be of the priestly

class and so unable to pass through a graveyard. Only of course this is the 21st century.

Anti-immigrant sentiment taking a religious form – similar to the failure of the Bishop of

Bologna to count non-Catholic births in the city’s natality rate, or the mayor of Rouato

issuing a municipal ordinance (almost immediately overturned in court) on November 24,

2000 forbidding non-Christians from approaching within 15 meters of a Church, - are but

a few additional examples of the type of dynamic I am referring to.14 The severe anti-

Muslim sentiment expressed in parts of Europe, not only by skin-heads, neo-Nazis and

supporters of Le Pen but also by much more respectable figures are frightening examples

of this same dynamic. Nor am I referring here to Ms. Fallaci – but I direct your attention

to a recent book, by Jacques Ellul entitled Islam et judeo-christianisme, published

posthumously with a preface by the very distinguished French philosopher Alain

Besancon and which reads like a medieval anti-Semitic tract, except here it is the

Moslems and their “God” (whatever that can mean) who are presented as without Love

and so beyond the pale of shared humanness.15 As you know well, this problem of

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recognition (and lack thereof) is no minor issue at the fringes of the political arena – but

is at the very center of our social life making demands that cannot be met by the

privatization of that for which we demand recognition! (Recall as well that the term

“Judeo16-Christian tradition” is of recent coinage, it appeared only following the Second

World War and the genocide of European Jewry. No one discussed the “Judeo-Christian

tradition” at the First Vatican Council or during the Dreyfus Affair in France).

Tolerance of constitutive difference is, I would say, all about the type of relations that

exist on the thick boundary lines of identity – and identity is always a group identity of

some sort. An identity that requires recognition, even as it distinguishes, separates and

questions the overall terms of collective belonging. Much of the economic and political

thrust of the modern world order has however been about replacing such group identities

with individual ones, replacing tolerance with rights and replacing a relatively small

number of what Ernest Gellner once termed multi-stranded relationship with an almost

infinite number of single-stranded ones. In the process, tolerance goes from being a

community centered act to an individual, almost psychological attribute or personal

characteristic. However, when threatened by new terms of collective membership,

immigration, demographic change, religious proselytism, ethnic consciousness and a

newly assertive gender politics, such psychological attributes seem not to be up to their

historical tasks.

For, of course there is nothing wrong (practically or morally) with “solving” the problem

of intolerance – that is of constitutive difference - by removing the social conditions that

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make tolerance necessary. On the contrary when it is possible, it seems to work well. But

my feeling is that the conditions which defined the “high-modernity” of the Western

European and especially, North Atlantic nation-state – and which allowed this particular

solution, or rather elision of the problem - are currently changing. A return to group

based identities and to religious commitments, both Christian and non-Christian, in many

parts of the world, the growth of trans-national identities predicated on religion, ethnicity

and nationhood not dependent on Statehood are all calling into question the type of

individual identities that stood at the core of the revolutionary 18th century idea of

citizenship – especially as developed it in the USA.

What we witness today is in fact a huge withdrawal of different groups into themselves, a

closing of ranks against the outside world and a reticence to interact with those who are

truly different. The recent trend among certain Churches in the American West and

South-West, to enclose banks, pre-schools, gyms and coffee shops within the precincts of

the Church is an interesting case in point. Certain, rather uncritical sociologists have seen

this as indications of the growing worldliness of the Churches. But surely the lesson is

much the opposite. Rather than forcing the Churched into the world, it allows their

withdrawal from the world. One no longer need to stand on line in the bank with the

funny dark-skinned fellow with the turban, or have coffee with the veiled woman or work

out with other than Church music on the loud-speakers. One can in fact separate from the

world and attempt to constitute one’s own community of grace. You see I was very

serious at the beginning of my remarks when I claimed that secularism was just one

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moment in the ever-unfolding dynamic of Christian civilization, rather than its terminus

ad quem.

It was, after all, this very separating impulse that informed the first Puritan emigration

and settlement in the New World and its failure in the second half of the 17th century that

led to the important acceptance of the principles of toleration and freedom of conscience

(which was not recognized by earliest 17th century, immigrating Puritans) that we have

discussed above.

Its re-emergence not only among Christians, but among other communities as well raises

serious questions as to the vitality of those very freedoms that we have come to accept as

given and immutable aspects of the political order. The growth of human rights as, what

Michael Ignatieff called a form of “idolatry”, that is as a “trump” in every argument will

not in itself counteract this development which, in turn, will leave rights themselves as

nothing but formal enactments of positive law, bereft of the very legitimizing aura that

made of them beacons of freedom in the past two hundred years.17

The maintenance of pluralistic forms of society and a constitutive tolerance of difference,

as well as a tolerance of constitutive difference may then turn on our ability to re-engage

with traditions and eschew the “trump” of individual rights. This is no doubt a strange

and counterintuitive call, which some may see as conservative, if not reactionary in its

implications. In truth however, it is a call, not to return to the Christian sources of rights –

as perhaps the Vatican may well wish to do; but rather to bring about a total

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reconceptualization of the categories within which we think the problems of religion and

secularism and its cognate problems of freedom of conscience, individual rights and

collective responsibilities. What is called for is not a simple return to Christian sources,

rather a re-engagement with traditions, including those well beyond the Christian - in

order to go beyond the current impasse of post-Christian (i.e. secular) political categories.

Such an engagement may in fact bring us to very new ways of understanding how a

constitutional secularism could come together with a heteronomous morality, in a manner

not rooted in the workings of individual conscience. This, as I see it, is the only real way

of beginning to address the problems of religion and secularism in today’s global order.

1 On the category religion see; Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1990; On Christian use of see; Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines, The Partition of Jude-Christianity, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 2 Georg Jellinek, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens: A Contribution to Modern

Constitutional History, (Westport: Hyperion Press, 1979). Pg. 48.

3 Ibid., 53.

4 Ibid., 80.

5 Ibid., 74-75.

il

6 See for example, Donald Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1988.

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7 See, Thomas Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders

and the Philosophy of Locke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988; Steven Dworetz, The

Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism and the American Revolution, Durham: Duke University Press,

1990; Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1994.

8 Elisha Williams, The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants (Boston, 1744) reprinted in Political

Sermons of the American Founding Era 1730-1805 2nd ed. 2 vol. ed. Ellis Sandoz, Indianapolis: Liberty

Fund, 1988.

9 Transcript of the Final Manuscript of Washington’s Farewell Address, 19 September 1796

(http://www.virginia.edu/gwpapers/farewell/fwatran.html).

10 This argument has been worked out in detail in Stephen Dawson, A Facsimile of Grace: The Protestant

Basis for Order in the Early American Republic, Phd Dissertation, Boston University, 2004.

11 On the relevance of this attitude towards contemporary issues in France see; Michael Shurki,

“Decolonialization and the Renewal of French Judaism: Reflections on the Contemporary French Jewish

Scene,” Jewish Social Studies, 6, #2 (2000) pp.156-176.

12 See for example, Charles Taylor, MultiCulturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton

University Press,

13 La Republica, 15.10.2000, “Lodi, la lega alla guara santa”

14 Il Giorno, 24.11.2000, “Il sindaco Alla larga dalle chiese infedeli”

15 Jacques Ellul, Islam et judeo-christianisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004.

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16 Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History. Chicago: Chicago University

Press, 1989.

17 Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

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