Talk Islam

thabet

  • 07:50:30 pm on May 26, 2008 | # | |
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    The post-Reformation doctrine that it was the state’s business to secure religious uniformity within its polity — or at least to exclude Dissenters from important rights — was crucial to the formation of the early modern state. By contrast, the secular Enlightenment theory that the political community consists of an abstract collection of equal citizens was propounded as a criticism of the religious inequality characterizing the absolutist state. The most famous document embodying that theory was the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.” The theory was critized almost from the moment it was first stated — notably by Burke for the license it gave destructive passiosns, and by Marx for disguising bourgeois self-interest. However, the decisive moments that helped to break the alliance of church and state seem to have been religious rather than secular — Tractarianism in England and Ultramontanism in France and Europe generally. The arguments they deployed most effectively were strictly theological and were aimed at securing freedom of Christ’s church from the constraints of an earthly power. An important consequence of abandoning the total union of church and state was the eventual emergence of “minority rights” as a central theme of national politics. Members of minorities became at once equal citizens, members of the body politic (”the people as a whole”), and, as a minor body, unequal to the majority, requiring special protection.

    –Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford University Press, 2003.

     

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  • razib 8:16 pm on May 26, 2008 | #

    hm. looks interesting. without having read the book i would disagree with any argument that privileges the 19th century in this way. by analogy, a redwood may grow in absolute terms mostly in the decades since planting, but the initial seeding is critical in determining the total arc of growth. so in the cases above 19th century catholic ambivalence to the interfering hand of the church is conditioned by the experience during the 1790s, as well as earlier assaults by secularists and protestants. in england the shift seems even more explicitly evolutionary, with the period between 1650-1700, calvinist republic to protestant constitutional monarchy, being seminal….

  • thabet 1:17 pm on May 27, 2008 | #

    I have expanded the quote to cite the entire paragraph.

    Asad is charting the emergence of ‘religious minorities’ in Europe. What interests me is the active involvement of religious believers (even if they have been ‘conditioned’ over time).

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