| By W.
Clark Gilpin
Margaret E. Burton Professor of the History of Christianity and
Theology
University of Chicago Divinity School
Respondents:
John
Schmalzbauer, Missouri State University
Kristen Tobey, University of Chicago
This month, the Clark Gilpin considers “secularism” as a keyword
American religious history, contrasting “old” transfer of authority
models of with “new” spatial models of the role of religion in American
life:
In the transfer of authority model, the secular represents
a framing worldview that challenges the religious worldview and,
in the modern West at least, supplants religion as the comprehensive
interpretive framework. In the spatial model, the central difficulty
of modernity is violence sanctioned by differing religious convictions
or ideologies, and the secular establishes spaces within which
these differences can be negotiated. The earlier model asks about
the continuance of religion in the modern world. The more current
model is all too aware of religion’s continuance and asks how
different forms of religion interact with one another and operate
within the modern polity…In what follows, I employ a spatial model
of the secular, arising from my reflections on the writings of
Asad and Taylor, to point to three “modes of secularism” in American
history that I designate religious, irreligious, and areligious.
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