Secular toleration re-admits privatized religion into public only as legally managed expression
Evidence
At the beginning of this study I proposed that the modern idea of a secular society included a distinctive relation between state law and personal morality, such that religion became essentially a matter of (private) belief—a society presupposing a range of personal sensibilities and public discourses that emerged in Western Europe at different points in time together with the formation of the modern state. Another way of putting this is that the idea of religious toleration that helps to define a state as secular begins with the premise that because belief cannot be coerced, religion should be regarded by the political authorities with indifference as long as it remains within the private domain. The individual’s ability to believe what he or she chooses is translated into a legal right to express one’s beliefs freely and to exercise one’s religion without hindrance—so “religion” is brought back into the public domain. This freedom is qualified, however. The public expression of religious belief and performance of religious ritual must not be a probable cause of a breach of the peace, nor should it be construable as a symbolic affront to the state’s personality. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 978
Categorization
- XREF: Directly corroborates the Cooper thread already in the vault: ‘secular modernity’ quietly privileges Christian-style privatized belief, exactly the move Cooper identifies in conservative Christian co-optation of religious-freedom discourse against abortion and same-sex marriage.
- DEFINE: Asad’s key move: toleration as the premise that defines the secular state — religion enters public only when funneled through a legal right whose exercise must not affront ‘the state’s personality.’
- ADDENDUM: Could support the sacrifice/immodesty essays by showing how ritual acts (dress, sacrifice-like protest) get policed when construable as affronts to state personality.
- SEED: Angle: the state framed as ‘a person who can be morally threatened’ — a legal-fiction personhood that licenses suppression of symbolic religious acts; essay on what it means to insult a corporate body.