There is today a pervasive drive for believers of established religions to betray the obligations of his or her creed or to abscond from defending or at least, performing the teachings of one’s faith, especially when engaging in public political discussions. As the American political theorist William Connolly aptly described it, this drive compels one “to leave one’s (religious) baggage at home” and to engage with each other solely on the basis of today’s privileged horizons—secular, scientific, statist and self-interested rationalities. From the media’s totalizing portrayal of Islamic believers as potential terrorists to Catholic church-goers as bigots unreceptive to change and dialogue, contemporary society forces the religious subject caught in the intersections of the church, state and society to define himself as either a traitor of democracy or a religious fundamentalist, a medievalist or a modernist, violent or reasonable, despotic or democratic. Is there a way, however of mobilizing a mode of existence in which one can be neither? Is it possible to define the public political space as simply another position from many other positions which our constructed identities and bodies (religious, cultural, social, sexual) occupy, move into and leave at some point rather than one which should authoritatively define us over and above any other source or tradition of identification?

But first, what makes these calls to betray one’s faith/religion formidable and so seductive today? I suggest that the contemporary denigration of religious discipline often proceed from a misappreciation, if not a complete misunderstanding of how religion operates or how its official protagonists would like it to operate at the very least. Part of the misunderstanding proceeds from the reality that religious organizations function on two seemingly contradictory logics: on the one hand, they often define their structures as autonomous from non-religious institutions and in this way operate on a privatizing logic. On the other hand, they also seek to accomplish goals institutionally demarcated as outside their own organizations. Since the 1970s, the social scientist Jose Casanova has described religious groups as becoming more and more deprivatized, that is increasingly performing activities beyond traditional spheres of private life into which religion has been pushed into since the Enlightenment, and as a result, becoming public actors on their own regard. This without prejudice of course to the inherently public nature of many religious creeds such as Christianity’s and Islam’s evangelizing fervor.

What anti-religion/anti-clerics fail to understand is that even as religious organizations have accepted the reality that their constituents must occupy public positions (and by these, I do not just refer to officially delegated public offices but the broader space of intersubjective engagement), the same constituents must nonetheless be governed on a fundamental level by their membership in their respective religions. In today’s contemporary order of neoliberal capitalism obsessed with the defense of deeply atomistic and self-centered discourses of human rights where group membership is reduced into group interests dominated by “I”s and where notions of the “we” are understood merely as the collective embodiment of these individualistic “I”s as the political philosopher Jean Bekthe Elshtain described it, the tendency of religious bodies to demand that their members endorse in public bids for power their religious beliefs is utterly confounding, if not completely repulsive. No wonder many of those advocating for a betrayal of religion in one’s performance of public functions are constituents of religious organizations themselves! Many Catholics for instance would invoke in a misconceived way the concept of individual conscience as if conscience can actually be enabled without regard for the authoritative interpretation of a religious institution’s leadership, traditions or magisterial/teaching bodies. For how can one still lend legitimacy to the same teaching institutions when they are supposed to have been superseded and rendered violent already by allegedly more emancipatory doctrines of individual choice and freedom which the State and not the religious institution can arguably guarantee? How can one continue believing in one’s religious leaders when the values they endorse can potentially threaten existing norms protected and proliferated by institutions of the State and of the market, reproduced in what Slavoj Zizek described as today’s hedonistic multiculturalist society?

By refusing to acknowledge the validity of religious institutions disciplining and policing their actors to act in a particular way in certain circumstances, the secularism trumpeted by modernizing and enlightened individuals today is stripped of its secularity—an observation that the German political theorist Carl Schmitt similarly made when he pointed out how all symbols of the sovereign State are in fact, secularized theological concepts, particularly how the State’s claims to have the right of deciding over life resounds in an equivalent way how God claims to have that absolute right. The call to betray religion then is founded on a more fundamental betrayal: the betrayal of secularism itself.

Given these, I propose that the only way out of the dichotomies enumerated at the beginning of this essay can only proceed through a more radical understanding and affirmation of the value of secularism: not as a privatization of religion but a recognition that religion will play a public role and will continue to do so in an increasing way in insisting that its agents and constituents live up to the demands of religious membership by aligning their whole selves and lives to the demands of the faith, even in the exercise of their public functions, broadly understood. Thus, to be truly secular means to wholeheartedly sanction the discipline of the sacred and the sacred’s right to intrude in publicly constituted secular institutions since those institutions have no claims to sacredness in the first place.

RR Raneses is an instructor at the Political Science Department. He specializes in   Political Theory, Comparative Politics, Democratic Theory and Church-State relations.