Whose Religion, Which Secular?

Abstract

In the paradigmatical accounts of religion from the late eighteenth century, such as Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries or Mere Reason (1793), and Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), religion is approached in terms of disembodied thought and feeling. Furthermore, religion was believed to have an essence, and was thus approached as a generic category, as something of its own kind. According to Kant, the essence of religion lies in its moral functions; in “the recognition of our duties as divine commands,”¹ while for Schleiermacher, the essence of religion is defined as “neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling.”² Kant’s disembodied notion of “pure reason,” understood as a non-religiously informed reason that is supposed to resolve moral and political matters in a way that is able to convince every rational human being, can in this sense be seen as paradigmatic for the modern notion of the secular as neutral or unbiased. This approach privileges secular reason, understood as a mode of universal discourse able to transcend particular traditions and religious forms of reasoning. According to the American scholar of religion Wayne Proudfoot “[t]he turn to religious experience was motivated in large part by an interest in freeing religious doctrine and practice from dependence on metaphysical beliefs and ecclesiastical institutions and grounding it in human experience.”³