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Sam HanSpatial Secularization:A Comparative Analysis of Religious Space in Mircea Eliade and Henri LefebvreSince the writings of Max Weber, though prefigured in the intellectual developments of the West beginning with the Renaissance and reaching a boiling point with Nietzsche,there has been a relatively widely accepted narrative of secularization and modernity.Though philosophers and anthropologists of religion have debated the dynamics of such a process, there has nevertheless been no serious disagreement with it. The narrative mapsthe Weberian thesis of “rationalization” onto a certain Western civilizationalhistoriography, in which Europe rises up from the depths of what philosopher CharlesTaylor has called the horizontal medieval world onto the vertical world of modernity.
The “secularization thesis” comprises of a variety of scholars that aim to tease outthe arguments which can be summed up by the formula: Secularization + Disenchantment= Modernity.
Since Weber’s description of modernity as the “disenchantment of theworld” [
Entzauberung
], which liberal French religion scholar Marcel Gauchet hasrecently picked up on, there has been a general agreement in the social sciences andhumanities that the weakening grip of Christianity and its monotheistic brethren Islamand Judaism, along with developments of technoscientific innovation are corollaries of this process of modernization.
Entzauberung
refers to decline of mysticism, one can easily make the argument that it resonates with Nietzsche’s earlier pronouncement regarding the “death of God.”
1
See Taylor, Charles.
A Secular Age
. Belknap Press, 2007.
2
See Martin, David.
On Secularization: Towards A Revised General Theory
. Ashgate Publishing, 2005;and Casanova, Jose.
Public Religions in the Modern World
. University Of Chicago Press, 1994.
3
See Weber, Max, Hans Heinrich Gerth, and Charles Wright Mills. “Science as a Vocation,” in
From MaxWeber: Essays in Sociology
. Routledge, 1998.
1
Yet, there have been numerous, though perhaps unwitting, notable exceptions andcomplications to the secularization thesis. One of the most famous of which is MarshallBerman’s veritable phenomenology of modernity, which quotes Marx’s dictum that “allthat is solid melts into air.”
Berman’s title is important as it highlights the rather startlingcomplexity with which Marx actually views capitalism. Shirking the cheap reading of Marx that paints him as the reductionist bearer of the phrase: “opium of the masses,” thelines at the beginning of the section on commodity fetishism in
Capital I
show a differentside, one that would go so far as to say that commodity fetishism displays “metaphysicalsubtleties and theological niceties.”
For Marx then, capitalism, though heavily reliant ontechnoscientific innovation, also exhibits some spiritual qualities, especially in its systemof values, what Lukacs famously called “reification,” which as Nietzsche reminds us is
always
a product of some form of monotheism.
And indeed, it is the case that scholars of religion have taken note of the fact thatin the unfolding of capitalist modernity, there has not been a linear progression in theform of “disenchantment,” or secularity. One could argue geopolitically that there has been a reawakening of religious imaginaries in the Americas, Africa, Latin America andAsia (but curiously not Europe).
Many scholars, particularly of Islam have been veryattuned to the fact that modernity and religiosity are
not
necessarily in opposition to oneanother, as some of the more hard-line (thus: more conservative) figures of thesecularization thesis would have it. Talal Asad, for example, has suggested “the secular”
4
Berman, Marshall.
All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
. Penguin, 1988.
5
Marx, Karl.
Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy
. Penguin Classics, 1992.
6
For Lukacs, see
History and Class Consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics
. MIT Press, 1972.; for Nietzsche, see
On the Genealogy of Morals
. Vintage Books, 1967.
7
PhillipGorski, among others, has suggested that Europe is exceptional when it comes to the level of religious participation. Panel discussion “From the Square: Exploring the Post-Secular,” NYU, February12, 2008.
2
is not a de facto space of the modern, but it is always in negotiation with the purported“sacred.”
Hence, the so-called resurgence of fundamentalisms of the Abrahamic variety(Christian, Jewish and Muslim) in the late-20
th
century is not so much a return, as it is arevelation to those of us in the Global North that have taken secularity for granted, and Iwould argue at a great cost. My purpose is not so much to suggest that there has been agreat moral, intellectual and political failure (which undoubtedly there is) in the way thatthe West has set a double-standard for Islam (as is the case in France regarding thewearing of the
hijab
) but more so the a failure in looking at how specifically conceptionsof space have come to reflect and also complicate the Weberian thesis.Why what will space contribute for the study of secularity? The importance of space can be illustrated by the importance, and I would argue, reliance upon the language“worlds” and “world-making” (or
mondialisation
as Jean-Luc Nancy has recently put it).
This is a fact often overlooked in the contemporary discourse on “the secular” that hasmade a strong return in very recently. It is unsurprising to a certain extent that the debateshave been organized wholly around the aspect of time implicit in the notion of secular
ization
. The –ization entails the progressive hegemony of secularity, that is, thenon-religious just as Rostow’s developmental notion of modernization entailed “stages of growth.” And as the scholars who roundly criticized Rostow and his cohorts, the troublewith any narrative of linear progression, whether it is with regard to economic growth or secularity, it is a bit too neat so as to speak to the realities of the realm of social practice.There have clearly been many scholars, theologians chief among them but notexclusively, who have sought to free the secularization thesis from Weberian orthodoxy
8
Asad, Talal.
Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
. Stanford University Press, 2003.
9
Nancy, Jean-Luc.
The Creation of the World or, Globalization
. SUNY Press, 2007.
3
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