Secularism and Religious Studies : A critical study of explicit and implicit approaches to secularism by theorists in religious studies

This essay studies the implicit and explicit perspectives of Bruce Lincoln, Jürgen Habermas, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Charles Taylor, José Casanova and their approach to secularism as a phenomenon. This is done by categorizing them into three categories. The categories,enlightenment-centered theorists, critical theorists and implicit-theological theorists, all have explicit accounts and implicit forms of reasoning that shape and contextualize their respective approach. The Enlightenment-centered theorists tend to regard secularism as a neutral and peace-keeping statecraft. This approach implicitly contains the idea of a clear division between secular and religious. This implicit form of reasoning I argue is problematically non-reflexive to the theorist’s own standpoint and risks becoming a form of secular ideology. The theorists categorized as critical theorists view secularism more as a type of discourse where what is seen as religious and the secular is inherently fluid. This is then analyzed by them as a special strategy for Western sovereignty. The perspective of the implicit-theological theorists is similar both to the Enlightenment-centered and the criticaltheorists' perspective in that secularism is primarily peace-keeping and that the categories are often fluid. I show that their approach contains theological assumptions that religion responds to a realm which challenges the immanent world. In the last chapter of the essay, I give a normative evaluation of the three approaches to secularism where I argue that while the enlightenment-centered theorists have useful explanatory models, the critical and to a lesser extent implicit-theological approach to secularism are more fruitful for religious studies. They allow for more flexibility in studying the relationship between secular and religious groups as they do not determine the categories in advance. The essay also contains a concluding discussion on the type of problems for philosophy of science and religious studies that arise when secularism and what is seen as the secular is deconstructed