The myth of secularism

Telos

Volumn 2014, Issue 167, 2014, Pages 162-179

  Ward, Graham ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84922018065     PISSN: 00906514     EISSN: 1940459X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3817/0614167162     Document Type: Review

References (31)

1. For a detailed account of this Act, its predecessor, the Loi du ler 190J relative au contrat d'association (which ruled as "associations of worship" and its successor the Loi du 2 Janvier 1907 concernant l'exercice public des cultes, which assured the continuity of the public exercise of worship within the association framework, see Raphaël Liogier, Une laicité légitime: La France et ses religions d'État (Paris: Entrelacs, 2006)
2. and Jean Daudouin and Philippe Portier, eds., La laicité: Une valeur d'aujourd'hui? Contestations et renégociations du modèle français (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001).
3. Raphaël Liogier, "Laicité on the Edge in France: Between Theory of Church-State Separation and the Praxis of State-Church Confusion", Macquarrie Law Journal 9(2009):27-29.
4. Rowan Williams, "Secularism, Faith and Freedom", in Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward, eds., The New Visibility of Religion (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 45-57.
5. See Robert Marquand, "With Pope's Visit, Sarkozy Challenges French Secularism", The Christian Science Monitor, September 15, 2008.
6. Grace Davie, Religion and Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000).
7. Galium G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000 (London: Routledge, 2009)
8. Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999).
9. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, p. 175.
10. See Steve Bruce, Religion in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995);
11. Religion in the Modem World (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996);
12. and God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
13. For David Voas, see "Surveys of Behaviour, Beliefs and Affiliation", in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, ed. James A. Beckford and N. J Demerath (London: Sage, 2007), pp. 128-50.
14. See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
15. See S. N. Eisenstadt, 'Multiple Modernities', Daedalus 129, no 1(2000):1-29;
16. and Peter Taylor, Modernities: A Geohislorical Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
17. See William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009).
18. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 37. Interestingly, and significantly, Kant defines the axiom of biblical theology (which keeps it out of reach for rational theology) as: "revelation, the Bible must be interpreted in its own terms, not by reason; for the source of the knowledge it contains lies elsewhere than in reason. " But on behalf of rational theologians he replies to that objection: "Precisely because we accept this book as divine revelation, we cannot give a merely theoretical interpretation of it by applying the principles proper to the study of history.... We must interpret this book in a practical way, according to rational concepts"
19. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (London: Harvester Whcatsheaf, 1993), p. 131.
20. For a more developed understanding of what is at stake here in terms of making a belief believable, see Graham Ward Unbelievable (London: 1. B. Taurus, 2014).
21. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, pp. 32-35.
22. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, p. 169.
23. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990).
24. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, pp. 130-32.
25. Carl Sclimitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 36.
26. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London-Vintage Hooks 2000), p. 113.
27. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1946), p. 6.
28. Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 1.
29. Christopher Flood, "Myth and Ideology", in Thinking Through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 186-87.
30. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), p. 28. Sorel quotes Newman appreciatively: "What imagination does for us is to find a means of stimulating these motive powers; and it does so by providing a supply of objects strong enough to stimulate them".
31. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 9. He also saw that use of myth was politically a rightwing activity. He doesn't examine this, despite his attention to the depoliticizing effects of myth.