ABSTRACT
The secular, to say nothing of the postsecular, is an academic industry with few rivals. It is a debate whose terms are at root essentially contested: that is, in offering clear definition of the secular or postsecular, we necessarily say something normative, something not purely empirical, something—some would ironically say—religious about the world. This underscores the point of Daniel Philpott’s excellent 2009 article in The Annual Review of Political Science, that we have come to ask ‘not why the political influence of religion has returned but why it ever went away. Or, better yet, why anyone ever thought it went away’ (Philpott 2009). Perhaps this thing called secularism never really arrived, or if it did, it arrived rather unevenly, in lecture halls on the coasts of the North Atlantic world, but hardly at all in the villages of sub-Saharan Africa, the madrasas of the ancient Silk Road, or the temples of Southeast Asia. My point is not that there is no such thing as a postsecular, because the secular itself is so famously contested, 1 but rather that an especially global perspective is critical, lest we become lost in the fashionable ideologies of the North Atlantic world and forget, as Scott Thomas points out, that ‘strong religions and weak states’ still make up much of the world (Thomas 2005).
