Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration: Toward an Agency-Focused Reassessment
The narrative according to which secularization engenders toleration originated in the Enlightenment epoch and until recently had been largely taken for granted in the social sciences and humanities. It presumes that the progress of toleration is insepara
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Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration: Toward an Agency-Focused Reassessment Vyacheslav Karpov and Manfred Svensson
1.1 The Intertwined Histories of Toleration and Secularization While hiding after being branded a traitor for his criticism of the 1793 French Constitution, the Marquis de Condorcet wrote one of the most representative works of Enlightenment historical thought, the Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. Published posthumously in 1795, it not only argued for a discernable pattern of development in human history but also for specific links between individual
V. Karpov (*) Sociology, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. Svensson Philosophy, Universidad de los Andes, Las Condes, Chile e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 V. Karpov, M. Svensson (eds.), Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54046-3_1
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V. KARPOV AND M. SVENSSON
freedom, secular science, and tolerance. Thus, Condorcet described the epoch of Crusades as a time when “theological reveries, superstitious delusions, are become the sole genius of man, religious intolerance his only morality.”1 The time from Descartes to the formation of the French Republic, in contrast, he depicted as a period in which “religious intolerance still survives,” but merely “as a homage to the prejudices of the people.” However somber this past may be, a more promising future could be expected thanks to the “general diffusion of the philosophical ideas of justice and equality.”2 The view so forthrightly expressed by Condorcet has outlived the Enlightenment era, morphed into the mainstream of Western humanities and social sciences, and has persisted well into the twenty-first century. A hundred and seventy years after the publication of Condorcet’s Outlines, Harvey Cox used sociological arguments to herald the dawn of a “secular city” where secularization and urbanization bring about an age of “no religion at all.” “Pluralism and tolerance,” Cox wrote, “are the children of secularization. They represent a society’s unwillingness to enforce any particular worldview in its citizens.”3 Lately, such sweeping and candid statements of this view have become less common, at least in academic literature. Yet, the view itself has persisted, albeit in more sophisticated versions. Thus, for instance, more recently, the sociologist Bryan Wilson has argued that toleration owes its origins exclusively to secularization and rationalization of society. By this he means neither the ideas of tolerationists, nor those of secularists (Condorcet’s “philosophical ideas of justice”), who, Wilson says, can be as intolerant as religious proselytizers. He simply refers to the social and technological changes which did away with religion’s influence over other dimensions of human existence. Once that process leads to a secular state, the conditions for the toleration of multiple religions would be ripe.4 Although separated by more than two centuries
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