Interrogating Post-Secularism:Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Talal Asad

This study is a comparative analysis of the theories of secularism by three influential contemporary scholars: Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Talal Asad. Jürgen Habermas proposes a new concept—post-secularism—to address "the continued existence of religious communities in a continually secularizing environment." In this new context, Habermas suggests that religion and the secular have to learn from each other rather than subordinating religion to the authority of secular reason, like modern secularism. Yet Habermas insists that religion has to be "translated" by neutralizing its general dangerous components beforehand in order to contribute to the secular sphere. Broadly agreeing with Habermas, Charles Taylor argues that secularism is a way of managing the diversity of religious, non-religious, or anti-religious views without privileging one over another. However, for Taylor, since religious language is not understandable by all, a neutral "official" language has to be developed in a secular society. Whereas Talal Asad finds the essentialization of religion by modern secularists and continued by both Habermas and Taylor problematic; Asad instead suggests both religion and the secular are spatio-temporal constructions that have no universal essence. Therefore, for Asad, the increasing fear of a general religious revivalism, the rise of religious extremism, especially Islamic fundamentalism, could be addressed only by recognizing its construction in the particular socio-political circumstances instead of mystifying religion as essentially dangerous