The Transnationality of the Secular

This essay discusses in how far we can understand the evolution of secularism in South and Southeast Asia between the end of the First World War and decolonisation after 1945 as a result of transimperial and transnational patterns. In the context of the growing comparative literature on the history of secularisms around the globe, I argue for more attention for the mobility of ideas and people across borders. Conceptually, I suggest to capture the diversity of 20th century secularisms in terms of family resemblance and to understand this resemblance less as colonial inheritance but as the result of translocal networks and their circuits of ideas and practices since 1918. I approach these networks through a combination of global intellectual history, the history of transnational social networks, and the global history of non-state institutions. Empirically, I illustrate my argument with three case studies: the reception of Atatürk’s reforms across Asia and the Middle East to illustrate transnational discourses around secularism; the role of social networks in the form of translocal women’s circles in the interwar period; and private US foundations as global circuits of expertise. Together, these illustrations are an attempt to sustain a certain degree of coherence within globalising secularism studies while at the same time avoiding conceptual overstretch.

Russian Orthodoxy and Secularism

Russian Orthodoxy and Secularism surveys the ways in which the Russian Orthodox Church has negotiated its relationship with the secular state, with other religions, and with Western modernity from its beginnings until the present. It applies multiple theoretical perspectives and draws on different disciplinary approaches to explain the varied and at times contradictory facets of Russian Orthodoxy as a state church or as a critic of the state, as a lived religion or as a civil religion controlled by the state, as a source of dissidence during Communism or as a reservoir of anti-Western, anti-modernist ideas that celebrate the uniqueness and superiority of the Russian nation. Kristina Stoeckl argues that, three decades after the fall of Communism, the period of post-Soviet transition is over for Russian Orthodoxy and that the Moscow Patriarchate has settled on its role as national church and provider of a new civil religion of traditional values.

Global Religious and Secular Dynamics

Global Religious and Secular Dynamics offers a global historical perspective that integrates European theories of modern secularization and competing theories of global religious revival as interrelated dynamics. In the first section Casanova examines the emergence of the modern religious/secular binary system of classification within a critical review of Émile Durkheim’s and Max Weber’s divergent theories of religion. The modern system of classification is contrasted with the pre-axial one, in which all reality was organized according to the binary sacred/profane, and with the post-axial one, which was organized according to the binary transcendent/immanent. The second and third sections contrast the internal European road of secularization without religious pluralization with the external colonial road of global intercultural and religious encounters, particularly in Asia, that led to the global system of religious pluralism. The final section examines the contemporary intertwinement of religious and secular dynamics through the globalization of the immanent frame and the expansion of global denominationalism.