The Return of the Religious

Abstract

In the wake of events and issues on the contemporary geopolitical scene, modernity’s problematical secularist narrative, which is based on the progressive distancing of the secular from the reli- gious, has become even more vexed. Despite the relegation of religion to the domain of the private by the prevailing secularist discourse, religion has never ceased to be in the public space. The authority and force secularism held implied that the space religion occupied in the public domain was defined and regulated by this modernist narrative. It is thus not possible to imagine secularism without its other. The very act of separating religion from other domains, in particular from the domain of politics and culture, is a product of the coercive power of secularism. Indeed, not only the concept of the secular but also the very distinction between the religious and the secular is produced by the latter (Asad 2003, 193). The production of religion by the very forces of secularist narrative does not imply that religion’s mode of presence is simply enclosed by secularism, especially in the context of the geopolitics of today’s globalized world. Perhaps this is the reason that led many intellectuals to talk about the “return of the religious” or the “resurgence of religion.”

A certain religiosity, a determination by some other, whose contours are today more mobile and unpredictable than ever before, has now revealed itself to be one of the most decisive and persistent factors in the constitution of all cultural identity.

—De Vries 2001a, 9