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Towards Postsecular Sociology?

Gregor McLennan
Sociology 2007; 41; 857
DOI: 10.1177/0038038507080441

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 Sociology
Copyright © 2007
BSA Publications Ltd®
Volume 41(5): 857–870
DOI: 10.1177/0038038507080441
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore

Towards Postsecular Sociology?

■ Gregor McLennan
University of Bristol

ABSTRACT
This article identifies four articulations of the growing ‘postsecular’ condition of
social and political thought, and places the idea of sociology in relation to them. I
identify and critically engage with those aspects of poststructuralist vitalism, tran-
scendental realism, multiculturalist thinking, and the recent ‘dialogical’ sentiments of
Habermas that might undermine sociology’s definitive (but broadly conceived)
secularism/naturalism. This implies that if we are concerned about advancing the
role of ‘public sociology’ then we should be actively engaged in countering anti-
secular and anti-naturalistic elements of the postsecular climate.Yet we must avoid
anthropomorphizing sociology as a public player, and accept too that the postsec-
ular reconsideration of ‘faith versus reason’ stretches beyond the confines of epis-
temological and explanatory considerations per se.

KEY WORDS
Habermas / multiculturalism / naturalism / postsecular / public sociology / realism

Secularism and the ‘Public Sociology’ Debates

n all the recent exchanges around themes relevant to this special issue – on

I public sociology (Burawoy, 2005), on British sociology and public intellec-

tuals (Turner, 2006), on the University as a public good supporting critical
sociological thinking (Calhoun, 2006), and on cosmopolitan sociology (Beck,
2006) – one issue has remained significantly understated. This is the question
of how definitively secular in character sociology is, and how necessarily secu-
lar in character are the public spaces and agencies that various commentators
in those debates seek to uphold, such as civil society, critical social philosophy,
the interests of humanity, reflexive pluralism, and so on. We could note, for

857
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858 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

example, that even in the formulations of cosmopolitanism, which most

obviously sit at a distance from that specific sense of secularism associated with
the political authority of the nation state, a) no convincing argument is made
that the state form is likely to be superseded as such, and b) a general secular
public ethos of democratic reasonableness is consistently intimated.
But if attachment to secularism in these debates takes an understated form,
secularism is no longer taken for granted in social theory. By contrast with pre-
vious decades, there seems to be a new ambivalence or reticence about secular-
ism, certainly a difficulty. ‘In its origins,’ Michael Burawoy asserts, ‘sociology was
inherently public’, and now what is needed is ‘a 21st century public
sociology of global dimensions’ (Burawoy, 2005: 281–2). However, the sense of
uplifting continuity that is conveyed here cannot be assumed to secure
agreement. This is because, in Charles Taylor’s (2004) terms, Burawoy is invok-
ing as normatively appropriate for both sociological phases the kind of ‘metatopi-
cal space’ – the public sphere – and the kind of ‘metatopical agency’ – the people
– that have been central to the deep-lying ‘social imaginary’ of Western
modernity. Yet this social imaginary and its meta-topics are now, in an age of
postcolonial multicultural reflexivity and apparently resurgent religiosity, being
subjected to intense scrutiny. It is this gathering force of questioning that I am
designating as the ‘postsecular’ moment.
In this understanding, the ‘reach’ of secularism cannot be confined to con-
ceptions and norms of public spaces or agencies. Taylor, for his part, construes
a social imaginary as ‘our grasp on the wider predicament: how we continu-
ously stand in relation to others and to power’ (2004: 27), and he asserts that
the modern social imaginary is based on ‘radical secularity’, not only in the
sense of effecting the ‘removal of God or religion from public space’, but also
in its most general presumption that the very constitution of society lies in com-
mon social action and nothing else besides, that is, nothing at all transcendent
(2004: 93).
These theoretical strokes are undoubtedly very broad brushed. Is there
really a necessary connection, we might ask, between political secularism –
some notion of civil society and government free of domination by any partic-
ular religion – and the general mode of social understanding to which Taylor
refers? And is secularism really the most appropriate term for convening the
various ‘this-worldly’ approaches to the dynamics of the social world – realism,
positivism, naturalism, humanism, and so on? Nonetheless, there remains
something compelling and contemporary about framing such matters under the
rubric of secularism and its discontents. For one thing, it encourages sociolo-
gists explicitly to address, in their own way, the implications of the Dawkins
Debate (Dawkins, 2006): is the sociologist’s job, for example, exclusively to
track and comprehend the state of religious social and intellectual solidarities
today, or should we also be exposing the ‘delusions’ – or singing the praises –
of the religious consciousness itself? Moreover, as mentioned, the question of
secularism enters directly into the feasibility of ‘provincializing’ Western soci-
ology by establishing a cultural plurality of sociological publics.

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 Towards postsecular sociology? McLennan 859

Arguably, though, the historic institution of secularism and the attitude of

social naturalism are so core to the very idea of sociology that they simply can-
not be provincialized in that way. Arguably, if naturalism and humanism in sec-
ular vein cannot be made to travel across many provinces, or held to trump
other social imaginaries, then any ‘project’ of global public sociology is entirely
chimerical. Burawoy’s vision, for example, driven initially by Leftist inclina-
tions, becomes increasingly fuzzy and all-purpose as the logic of cultural plu-
ralism takes hold. This leads him to embrace at least two controversial
postsecular suggestions: that ‘organic sociologists’ can be found embedded in
‘communities of faith’, and that public sociology is capable of supporting
‘Christian Fundamentalism’ (2005: 264, 266).
To take these themes further, I want to indicate how the issue of secular-
ism/postsecularism has become pivotal to four different areas of social theory.
In interpreting these developments, I challenge the ease with which some post-
secularists move from observations on the social role of faith or spirituality to
intellectual endorsements of faith-led perspectives on social life. From any gen-
erally naturalistic perspective on the idea of sociology (e.g. McLennan, 2006),
the strains of fideism and obscurantism that surface in these literatures give
cause for concern. Thus, when Burawoy rousingly announces that sociology
today must show its public face by defending civil society and the interests of
humanity against the tyrannies of the market and the state, it is becoming
important to add … ‘and against the encroachments of religiosity too’. This
does not mean that sociologists cannot be religious; it just means that their reli-
giosity comes into play when, for whatever reason, their sociology ceases to
provide the answers they seek.

Expressions of Postsecularism: Poststructuralist Vitalism

As with the term postmodern, the ‘post’ in postsecular need not automatically
signal anti-secularism, or what comes after or instead of secularism. For many,
the key postsecular move is simply to question and probe the concept of the sec-
ular, and to re-interrogate the whole ‘faith versus reason’ problematic that has
so consistently punctuated modern thought. This probing seems timely, not
least because under postpositivist lights, mainstream philosophical thought is
now fairly comfortable about looking at modern science itself as a kind of ‘web
of belief’. Accordingly, little is to be gained by harking back to rigidly scientis-
tic models for sociological epistemology. Even so, it remains hard to see how
sociology can be other than ‘on the side of science’, and the postsecular move
to surpass the antinomy between (religious) faith and (naturalistic) reason turns
out to be much easier said than done.
Let me exemplify this claim by examining one ‘postmodernist’ expression
of postsecularism, noting first that several prominent figures within poststruc-
turalist social theory (Virilio, Kristeva, de Certeau, Agamben) have pointed to
new forms of ‘re-enchantment’ in the world, or highlighted the sacred forms of

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860 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

‘bare life’, or insisted that the received view of modernity itself as being
thoroughly disenchanted is plain mistaken (Bennett, 2001). Derrida (2001), for
his part, has been developing something like ‘religion beyond religion’, while
Rorty is trying to square his erstwhile secular postmodern pragmatism with
Vattimo’s idea that secularization itself is our contemporary way of following
the religious life (Rorty and Vattimo, 2005). Finally, Zizek (2003) has been
arguing that in a secular world that is hardly ‘beyond belief’, the Judeo-
Christian heritage must be defended for the sake of Leninist politics. All these
expressions of postsecular theory are interesting; but too complex and cryptic
for our purposes. More amenable to summary treatment is political theorist
William Connolly’s manifesto Why I am Not a Secularist (1999), which also
reveals something of the current renaissance of vitalism.
Connolly insists that the kinds of distinctions that are characteristic of sec-
ular social thought, such as that between public and private, and between rea-
son, emotion and morality, have completely broken down. Secularists, he says,
uphold such distinctions mainly in order to screen out any ‘metaphysics of the
supersensible’, and so those distinctions themselves stand, precisely, as meta-
physical commitments. And viewed in that light, secular philosophies can then
be regarded, and pitied, as essentially ‘winter’ doctrines, formulae in search of
an impossible moral stabilization and cognitive purity. But if instead we
develop an ‘impious reverence for life’, embracing rather than disavowing
desire, the visceral and the impure, and accepting wholeheartedly the mixedness
of modes of apprehension whereby we grasp the ‘protean energies’ that flow
through the organization of all things, then we are better placed to avoid the
political exclusionism that necessarily results whenever the ‘irrational’ is intel-
lectually stigmatized or empirically ignored. What then emerges is a more plu-
ralistic, open, life-enhancing ethical stance, one that requires us to abjure
altogether the traditional opposition of social science to religious worldviews.
Instead, a conscious embrace of ‘multiple loyalties’ should be cultivated, a spir-
itual openness that might be regarded as nothing less than the very soul of the
‘democratic adventure’ (Connolly, 1999: 24, 54, 88, 95).
There are two main problems with this apparently refreshingly innocent
outlook. The first is that this kind of discourse is characteristically expressive
and philosophical rather than social scientific, and whilst many of us would
insist that these two facets of social understanding are closely interwoven, they
are not identical. One need not follow Goldthorpe (2004) in dismissing the kind
of general debates that I listed at the head of this article, and no doubt this par-
ticular discussion of postsecularism too, as nothing but ‘pretend social science’
to grow weary of indeterminate reflexive speculation, untrammelled by empir-
ical positivity and systematic propositional thinking. Thus, leaving aside the
question of how good it is as philosophy, it is not obvious that Connolly’s free-
wheeling postsecularism could ground any public sociology as such, rather than
serving as one kind of straw in the wind.
But in any case, secondly, it remains unclear how deeply postsecular
Connolly’s discourse actually is, and how far it is particularly encouraging of

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 Towards postsecular sociology? McLennan 861

those who take their religious faith seriously. As one observant reviewer on an
Islamicist web journal noted,1 the whole framework of argument that Connolly
constructs, and the agonistic moral pose adopted, are ‘only intelligible within a
secularist worldview’. Notably, he ‘does not deliver a single confessional reflec-
tion’, and exudes merely ‘a dogmatic claim of uncertainty’ that genuine believ-
ers can only experience as thoroughly disingenuous. This is germane, because
the moralistic tone that is evident in Connolly’s discourse gains much of its
strength from the implication that his ‘open’ perspective on the plenitude of
social being would be something that the faithful would thank him for bring-
ing to their attention. No wonder, then, that as his discussion wears on,
Connolly spins his stance in rather different terms, naming it finally as one of
‘ironic evangelical atheism’, signalling a spirit of ‘nontheistic gratitude for the
… plurivocity of being’ (1999: 159). Secularism may well be in question here,
but it has hardly been negated.

Transcendental Realism

My second instance of postsecularism highlights the way in which authors

within the critical realist movement have moved steadily away from their
1970s’ concern to be specifically ‘for science in the social sciences’ (Papineau,
1978) to embark upon spiritually transcendent quests. Critics always suspected
realism of being overly metaphysical, proliferating theses about the nature and
levels of being that were strictly surplus to investigative requirements. And real-
ism, internally, was from the start somewhat divided between naturalist and
anti-naturalist strands (Benton, 1981). But now Roy Bhaskar, its leading theo-
rist over the years, has developed critical realism into a cosmic speculative phi-
losophy that is increasingly dislocated from social science explanatory practice.
Bhaskarian realism now claims directly to access, and to name, in a series
of extravagant hypostatizations, the essential objects of understanding – ‘the
transcendent’, the ‘ultimatum’, ‘the absolute simpliciter’, and ‘the categorical
structure of the world’. This is no longer a project to establish the plain old
truth, but an immanent unveiling of what realists now call the ‘alethic’ truth, a
kind of really true truth, sometimes rendered as ‘the self-grounding ground of
all being’, or, in simple terms, God (Bhaskar, 2000: 31). By way of such spi-
ralling equations (man=God=unconditional love/joy=the cosmic envelope), all
remnants of analytical precision and empirical constraint are thrown to the
winds. But it gets worse, because a foolish piece of intellectual blackmail is
thrown in for good measure: if you choose to be sceptical about all this, then
you are ‘in denial’, victim of the ‘cardinal error of Western philosophy’, namely
seeking and proposing a purely ‘positive’ account of being that falsely ‘absents’
the fundamental category of ‘absence’ itself (Bhaskar, 2000: 7–8). In trying to
come to terms with this inflated, reifying, entirely self-sustaining run of
thought, Popper’s notion of falsifiability once again comes to mind as a useful
criterion of assessment.

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862 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

The sociological theorist Margaret Archer can no longer quite follow Bhaskar
in his ‘odyssey’, but she too increasingly seeks to find within both realism and soci-
ology an essentially religious rationale. For Archer and her co-authors, the driving
idea is to correct the previous secular bias within realist circles by establishing a
‘level playing field’ between atheistic realists and those who are believers (Archer
et al., 2004: x). To that end, the argument is put forward that we can be realist
‘about God’ in just the same way that we can be realist about other deep-lying
forces and powers, the exact nature of whose existence typically escapes the ever-
changing state of empirical knowledge. Realism, after all, enables us to hold our
ontological commitments steady, even when a large degree of epistemic relativism
is inescapable. God’s existence can therefore be rationally debated, and credible
points can be made on both sides. Belief and disbelief in God are thus both held
to be rational responses. It follows that ‘the objective arguments for and against
God’s existence are equally strong, or weak’ (Archer et al., 2004: 3).
But this train of argument is flawed. Realism, in the first place, is not, or at
least should not be, the kind of philosophy that enjoins us to be realist ‘about’
anything in particular. Originally, the realist project was to give an ontological
overview of the different levels of structure and appearance involved in any sub-
stantive process of knowledge, but the nature and identity of any specific exis-
tents and generative mechanisms were strictly the business of the specific
sciences. What specific investigative practice, it needs to be asked, informs us of
the nature and existence of God? Moreover, conclusions about what happens
to exist, and in what relations to other forces, are arrived at within the special
sciences only after painstaking, systematic, and publicly available empirical evi-
dence and theoretical reasoning concerning generative mechanisms and devel-
opmental patterns. Yet the ‘knowledge’ that we have of God is accepted to be
simply not of this kind, being chiefly a matter of revelation. In that sense, the
contemporary ‘realist’ debate about God is no further forward than the one
about the status of personal testimony concerning miracles that pitted David
Hume against George Campbell 250 years ago. We have good grounds, then,
to think that being realist ‘about’ God is not a viable or productive posture for
(scientific) realists to adopt, or one that is in any tangible way related to ques-
tions of substantive social investigation.
Notice, in addition, the conceptual slippage that marks Archer’s argument.
People do indeed have reasons for believing in God, and in that sense there is no
problem about thinking of the debate about God as ‘rational’ in a broad sense. But
it does not follow from the holding of reasons on both sides, that belief and disbe-
lief are equally rational responses. And even if they were considered equally ratio-
nal responses, that would not justify the conclusion that equally objective
arguments existed on both sides, nor would it mitigate the peculiarity of the idea
that objective arguments come in various strengths, ranging from ‘weak’ to ‘strong’.
Archer’s more sociological efforts to establish parity for religious conscious-
ness are blocked by parallel non-sequiturs. In Being Human (2000) – much of
which I find valuable – Archer specifies our ‘triune’ social environment as com-
prising the ‘practical order’, the ‘natural order’ and the ‘social order’, and each of

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 Towards postsecular sociology? McLennan 863

these is said to possess a distinctive logic. Definitive of the practical order, Archer
insists, is that its modes of knowledge and personal orientation are nothing like
‘applied’ rational understanding, nor can they be regarded as the consequences of
sociality and solidarity per se. Rather, the logic of practice is a matter of embod-
ied, experiential, ritualized, illuminated comprehension, and religious practice
stands as the quintessential example of this (Archer, 2000: 184–6). As a sui generis
form of practical action, this is deemed to be not (just) a matter of social routine,
but of genuine knowledge, specifically religious knowledge, in which emotionality
and understanding are too closely fused together, and too close to the lived disci-
pline of ecstasy, to be analysed in a superficially ‘rational’ way. What is going on
is a unique experience of, and formation of unity with, the divine. ‘Hence, the
appropriate response to divinity is love, love of the Transcendent itself’.
But this is not sociological thinking. As it develops, we move from an ana-
lytical stance that is poised between the inside and the outside of the phe-
nomenon under examination, to an insider’s standpoint only. Nothing in
Archer’s initially suggestive account of what people do and think and feel when
they are involved in intense, dense, affective practical routines sanctions in any
way her theologico-moralistic conclusion about what the divine requires by
way of ‘appropriate response’. Similarly, nothing whatever can be reasoned
about the existence of God or the divine or the transcendent from the (social)
fact that people display astonishingly rich and varied ways of expressing their
personal and collective commitments to such things.
In similar manner, Philip Mellor in Religion, Realism and Social Theory
turns on its head Durkheim’s definitively social understanding of what religious
collective effervescence represents. From the perfectly proper, or at least inter-
esting, sociological claim that religion can be seen as ‘a phenomenon that
expresses, through actions and beliefs, a collective engagement with the possi-
bility of transcendence emergent from the contingencies, potentialities and lim-
itations of embodied human life’, the proposition is steadily contrived that
society itself can be seen as ‘the creative force through which humanity realizes
its deepest, most profound levels of being’, in particular ‘hyper-spirituality’
(Mellor, 2004: 19, 67 and passim). But clearly there is a mutation going on
here, and an illegitimate one, such that religious hyper-spirituality, which
stands as the explanandum of the first thought, becomes the veritable explanans
in the second. From a collective engagement with the possibility of transcen-
dence, we get transcendence itself working in and through collective strivings.
This is straightforward religious essentialism, something that goes decisively
beyond anything that can be taken even from appreciative analysts of religion
like Durkheim or William James.

Multiculturalism

My third ‘case’ of postsecular argumentation is multiculturalism. Proponents of

multiculturalism in the North (e.g. Modood, 2005: chap. 7; Parekh, 2000:

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864 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

chap. 10) now frequently maintain that secularism in theory and practice is no
longer ‘off limits’. Indeed it is contended that ‘radical secularism’, with its firm
distinction between the public and the private realms, and its supposition that
rational knowledge holds a monopoly on social and personal wisdom, must
now be reckoned to be the principal obstacle to the multicultural project.
Meanwhile, in the South, some scholars regard the transportation of secular
political ethics as a disastrous cultural category mistake. In the case of India, for
example, the very nature of secularism as a Western ethnocentric construction
is thought to make its adaptation there nothing less than ‘impossible, impracti-
cal and impotent’ (Madan, 1998: 298). And multiculturalism, of course, has
made considerable inroads into the heartland of liberal political philosophy
itself. Amongst the latter’s notable exponents, Rawls (2001) altered his ‘origi-
nal position’ in recognition of cultural value-diversity amongst comprehensive
theories of the good, while Brian Barry (2001), staunchly critical of multicul-
turalism, was taken severely to task in several reviews for his apparently offen-
sive tone as well as his unreconstructed egalitarianism.
Such developments rightly forefront basic questions about the appropriate
form(s) of global social enquiry and debate. But it is vital to avoid false opti-
mism about the easy availability of any ‘critical’ consensus. For example, mul-
ticulturalist authors frequently posit an intimate connection between humanism
and secularism, and take that combination to pose a problem for the realization
of the kind of multiculturalism that will be appreciative of religious identities
and understandings. This sense of close connection between humanism and sec-
ularism is correct. Whilst many religious people are decent humanists, and all
the main religions come in versions that can be interpreted as soft on human-
ism, the great bulk are required to regard their humanism as derivative rather
than primary, since human dignity and equality do not come as stand-alone
facts about the human condition in itself, but only by way of God’s will. For
humanists, by contrast, ‘there are no supernatural or super-human beings to tell
us how to live’ (Norman, 2004: 15), and so humanism is radically ‘secular’ just
in so far as it requires a thoroughly naturalistic understanding of the state of the
world, and a truly egalitarian vision of the good society. Quite obviously,
humanists also regard a secular polity as preferable over one that is orientated
around religious identities or theocratic aspirations.
Multiculturalists raise a number of points that they think will be decisive
against secularism: that the origins of ‘the secular’ lie in the Christian tradition;
that the organization and operation of modern secular states are never com-
pletely separate from either their established religions or their otherwise ‘biased’
cultural formations; and that it is perfectly legitimate for religious people pub-
licly to voice their religious reasons for adopting whatever political position they
happen to hold. In fact, secular humanists can readily accept all these points, up
to a point. But it does not follow that the meaning and use of secularism is deter-
mined and tainted by its own religious origins (the ‘genetic fallacy’ is a constant
danger in multiculturalist polemic), or that the steady sacralization of political
discussion and social identity is necessarily a progressive development, or that

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 Towards postsecular sociology? McLennan 865

there should be institutional equalization of religious participation in politics

and education rather than a reduction of all forms of special treatment for
particular faiths.
The multiculturalist rejoinder then typically arises: is not humanism in any
developed form itself a faith, just like all the other faiths it seems intent on
diminishing? This riposte, however, is a mere contrivance. There are few
grounds for faith in ‘humanity’ as such, if the lessons of history are anything to
go by, and meanwhile what motivates the rejection of religious views of our
human situation is simply the overwhelming balance of evidence and argument.
In insisting that what exists, and what we should morally value, are matters
that are materially independent of any reference to the work, influence or good-
ness of any deity or divine principle hardly amounts to an attempt to replace
one sort of religious belief by another – curiously non-religious – sort.
Bhikhu Parekh and Tariq Modood are particularly keen to drive a wedge
between ‘moderate’ secularism, of which they approve, and ‘radical’ secularism,
which is said to be extreme and ‘ideological’ (Modood, 2005: 142). Moderate
secularism allows and perhaps encourages people to bring their religious moti-
vation into play as they pursue their political views and goals. Secularism still
holds sway, though, because those views and goals must pertain to political
matters involving the representation of the demos as a whole. Above all, the
offices, legislation and conduct of state must remain free of excessive religious
commitment or influence. Immoderate secularism, on the other hand, requires
that only secular reasons can ever be given for political thought, action, and
change (Parekh, 2000: 322).
The rhetorical strategy here is to make the distance between secular and
non-secular ‘moderates’ or ‘pragmatists’ on opposed sides appear narrower
than the gap between moderates and the ‘ideological’ radicals on the same side.
Yet this is a dubious equation, recalling tactics by Cold War liberals to ward off
Left-democratic challenges to their intellectual authority. In so far as secularism
is ‘ideological’, this is just to say that secularists take their commitments seri-
ously, meaning that they would feel obliged to oppose non-secular opinions and
actions that sought to dominate the agora on the basis of religious identifica-
tion. Moreover, for secular humanists, democratic debate in the public sphere
of civil society is an end in itself: its virtue and worth are sanctioned by no
external authority, nor serve any higher purpose. This is just what the ideas of
secularism and humanism mean.
We might even wonder whether such a thing as ‘radical’ secularism can be
coherently formulated. Normatively, no doubt, secularists probably wish to
argue that humanity would be better served if people stopped thinking, feeling
and acting as though supernaturally guided or tested, and they would prefer reli-
gious allegiance, where it exists, to remain a largely personal matter. But very few
strong normative secularists would advocate preventing non-secular people from
publicly airing their views, or expressing religious motivation for their preferred
political measures. This is because secularists are usually committed democrats as
a matter of principle, which involves embracing the possibility that views to

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866 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

which they are opposed might prosper. Since the same cannot be said for religious
fundamentalists, the rhetorical equation of ideological secularism with ideologi-
cal non-secularism completely falls apart. Meanwhile, holding even to ‘moderate’
secularism still requires considerable intellectual commitment, and it is difficult to
depict faith-led political engagement as equivalently ‘moderate’ without it
amounting to some sort of principled, rather than merely opportunistic, accom-
modation with secularism itself. In that sense, the gap between moderates and
radicals on the non-secularist side is either much narrower than multiculturalists
would have us believe, or it is much wider.

Epistemic Dialogism

Jurgen Habermas (2003, 2005, 2006) is the most prominent social thinker to
take up the notion of postsecularity, and his perspective – which we might call
epistemic dialogism – is the final module that I want to touch upon. Habermas
has been particularly affected by the promise of postsecularity since ‘9/11’.
Before then, as Fred Dallmayr (2003) has emphasized, whilst Habermas
showed consistent interest in questions of religion and modernity, overall he
shared little of the utopian messianism, or the feel for the unrepresentable, of
the first generation Frankfurt thinkers. For middle-phase Habermas, it was
truth claims rather than souls that had to be redeemed; the sacred was unapolo-
getically ‘linguistified’; and ‘methodical atheism’ was installed as the basis of
post-metaphysical social philosophy. Correlatively, Habermas was getting ever-
closer to the ‘thin’ proceduralism of Rawls. But just as Rawls himself had to
think harder about the ‘thick’ cultural preconditions of viable liberal politics in
a pluralist age, so Habermas, already better attuned to ‘lifeworld’ values, had
to reconsider the question of religion. What he now promotes is a ‘postsecular
self-understanding of society as a whole, in which the vigorous continuation of
religion in a continually secularizing environment must be reckoned with’
(Habermas, 2005: 26).
Habermas is still, unquestionably, a secularist – the ‘opaque core of religious
experience’, he says, cannot ultimately be ‘penetrated by’ philosophical reflec-
tion. Nevertheless, post-metaphysicians should now become philosophically
‘agnostic’ rather than methodically atheist (2006: 17). Above all, they must
overcome the ‘narrow’ secularism according to which ‘in the long run, reli-
gious views will inevitably melt under the sun of scientific criticism and …
religious communities will not be able to withstand the pressures of some
unstoppable cultural and social modernization’ (2006: 15). These thoughts
are hardly original, it has to be said (see Turner, 2001, for a more thorough
recent discussion of religion and modernity). But what does distinguish
Habermas’s postsecularism is his attempt to give responsive cultural politics
a socio-epistemological grounding.
Like the multiculturalists, Habermas is disturbed by the apparent asymmetry
in the respective burdens that are borne by religious and secular/non-religious

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 Towards postsecular sociology? McLennan 867

citizens in conforming to the terms of the modern liberal polity. Hitherto,

secularists have been expected to ‘tolerate’ the religious life to the point of untrou-
bled indifference, with believing citizens, for their part, painfully split in their per-
sonal and political identities (because secular politics can only be conducted in
value-terms that are available to everyone). But this overview is now inadequate,
Habermas insists. Yes, religious cultures must adapt, with difficulty, to four
inescapable conditions of modern secular life – the presence of other strong faiths,
the authority of science, the universalist mode of positive law, and a pervasive pro-
fane popular morality. But they should not be subjected to unfair psychological or
socio-cultural pressure in so doing. Postsecular culture must therefore openly rec-
ognize religion not just as a set of private beliefs but as an all-embracing source of
energy for the devout, and, actually, for society in general too. Except at the
highest institutional levels, the case goes, the demand that people cease to speak
politically in religious terms must be dropped (2006: 7–10).
Without such postsecular adjustments, the asymmetrical burdens of
participation would amount to nothing less than social injustice. Fortunately,
the responsibility for creating a responsive, deliberative democratic culture is
more equally shared than first appearance suggests. In Habermasian postsecu-
larism, non-believers, just like believers, are required to undergo an equivalent,
and intertwined, learning process. They too have to overcome ‘cognitive disso-
nance’, by accepting the continuing value of the religious consciousness and by
genuinely appreciating not only the human motivation for, but also the possible
truth-content of, religious worldviews (2006: 11–16, 2005: 28). Only when
these epistemic conditions are met will democratic citizens be able to give to each
other the fully human reasons for political stances that all are due. In this way,
Habermas (2003: 102–3) wants to break the idea of modernity as a ‘zero sum’
game between faith and reason, and to cultivate the kind of ‘enlightened com-
mon sense’ that can act as a ‘third party’ operating between and beyond the two.
In many ways, this is an attractive and good scenario, coalescing with other
critical reflections on secularism and scientism that also regard (reformed, man-
aged) secularism as unavoidable (Asad, 2003; Toulmin, 1990). Indeed, sociol-
ogy itself could readily be positioned as the very discourse that could sustain
Habermas’s vision of ‘enlightened common sense’ and the ‘unfinished dialectic’
of secularization, seeing as the kind of social naturalism we would want to
defend is far from the physicalist reductionism and ‘depersonalized’ scientific
naturalism that Habermas and others distrust.
For all that, there are residual problems with Habermas’s postsecularism.
The first is that throughout his recent discussions, Habermas tends to assume
that the majority of citizens in formally liberal states are consciously secularist,
either in the sense of being confirmed non-believers, or in being emphatic about
the need for a clear separation between religion and state, and between public
and private. But these assumptions are not empirically certain, nor is the polit-
ical literacy of the electorate so uniformly advanced. Meanwhile, conceptually
speaking, Habermas continually equates ‘secular’ with ‘non-believing’, and this
is also questionable. After all, it is possible to be a believer and a secularist at

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868 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

the same time, accepting that a ‘neutral’ state and liberal culture are necessary
to keep doctrinal and ritualistic differences from turning into full-blown social
conflicts. This is pertinent, because it is the construal of secularism as necessar-
ily atheistic and decisively majoritarian that allows Habermas to present natu-
ralism and not religiosity as the main obstacle that stands in the way of a new,
enlightened common sense.
The result is that the faith/reason polarity is consistently presented as if all
the humanity and richness and morality fall on the religion side, with nothing
but alienation and depersonalization on the side of secularism/scientific natu-
ralism. But my second objection is that this balance sheet is thoroughly dis-
torted. Religion may well cultivate a range of social and moral goods, but it
may equally well poison them too, and meanwhile many of the qualities sup-
posedly distinctive of religion – collective morality, existential meaning, love,
creativity and imagination, social energy, and spirituality – are readily encom-
passed and celebrated within a secular humanist outlook.
Thirdly, we should question Habermas’s insistence that mutual respect and
a common learning process between believers and non-believers must take an
epistemic form. Indeed, this proposal strikes me as both implausible and unde-
sirable. It is implausible because from within the perspective of secular socio-
logical naturalism (broadly conceived), the question of the ‘truth content’ of
claims about heaven and hell, God’s grace, salvation and the rest cannot really
be entertained: these items are not candidates for truth and explanation. That
is why the debating point sometimes scored by believers, to the effect that even
if God’s existence cannot be proven, at least it cannot be disproved either, has
no traction whatsoever. And the converse holds too: for a religious person
whose worldview really is grounded on the notion of some ultimate
Transcendent realm and an omnipotent, loving Spirit, then the explanation of
life in terms of generative mechanisms, interlocking contingent material pro-
cesses, and human agency can never be nearly enough.
Habermas is thus backing the wrong horse when he seeks to base demo-
cratic dialogue on epistemological reflexivity. Generally over-rated as a source
of self-correction, reflexivity is more effective in matters of ethics than of truth,
and in relation to life-affecting events rather than propositions. Moreover, the
power of common human morality in our appreciation of other people’s moti-
vation and purpose should not itself be sold short. We can readily respond to,
and value, people as people, partly through sociological imagination of their sit-
uation and plight, even if we are unlikely to share some of their presumptions
about truth, existence and causality.

Conclusion

In this article, I have examined the way in which ‘the postsecular condition’ is
expressed, albeit rather differently, in four segments of contemporary social
theory and philosophy. Whilst accepting that the postsecular concept possesses

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 Towards postsecular sociology? McLennan 869

considerable mileage for further debate, and having no difficulty with the idea
that a sheer stand-off between faith and reason is often unproductive, I have
also been advising that there are strenuous intellectual issues here that resist
conflation or easy compromise. In mounting these arguments, I am more com-
fortable than Habermas with the idea that religious citizens, and religious the-
orists, do indeed have a larger cognitive and political burden to bear in secular
society. In that sense, ‘the expectations of civic autonomy and demands of tol-
eration of a liberal republic’ do create a ‘reflective pressure’ that must lead reli-
gious people to worry that, in the long run, ‘theocentric or cosmocentric
doctrines and life-orientations’ will be undermined (Habermas, 2005: 23).
Furthermore, I have claimed that in so far as sociology is a ‘public player’
in these debates, it cannot be other than secular in an interpretative and ethical
sense. This is because sociology is definitively naturalistic in its mode of com-
prehension of the ways of the world, even if this is not to be equated with sci-
entistic reductionism. But to conclude on a slightly different note, sociology as
such is not a player of any kind: in current debates, ‘public sociology’ has been
excessively anthropomorphized, and we run the risk of serious disappointment
if we think of sociology as having some socio-political voice or presence all of
its own. Sociology, rather, is an explanatory and descriptive form of under-
standing, generally but decisively attuned to a secular world and a naturalistic
worldview. Nevertheless, important aspects of culture, democracy and personal
integrity do – naturally – stretch beyond these confines.

Note

1 http://www.islam21.net/pages/keyissues/key5–10.htm, consulted early 2006.

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Gregor McLennan

Is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Marxism and

the Methodologies of History (1981), Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond (1989), Pluralism
(1995), co-author of Exploring Society (2000), and co-editor of several volumes of socio-
political theory and cultural studies. His latest book is Sociological Cultural Studies:
Reflexivity and Positivity in the Human Sciences (Palgrave, 2006).
Address: Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, 12 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8
1UQ, UK.
E-mail: g.mclennan@bristol.ac.uk

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