Secularism’s essence is not protecting freedoms from religious tyranny

Evidence

A secular state is not one characterized by religious indifference, or rational ethics—or political toleration. It is a complex arrangement of legal reasoning, moral practice, and political authority. This arrangement is not the simple outcome of the struggle of secular reason against the despotism of religious authority. We do not understand the arrangements I have tried to describe if we begin with the common assumption that the essence of secularism is the protection of civil freedoms from the tyranny of religious discourse, that religious discourse seeks always to end discussion and secularism to create the conditions for its flourishing. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1230

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEEPTHINKING: Directly overturns the dominant liberal self-understanding of secularism as emancipation from religion, reframing it as a specific legal-moral-political arrangement.
• XREF: Connects to Asad’s broader project distinguishing secularism from secularity; also resonates with the New Atheism debate and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age caveats.

Related

• Secularism is a legal-moral arrangement, not the liberating opposite of religious tyranny (similarity 0.96)
• Secularism is not a mask for religion. (similarity 0.88)
• The secular is conceptually dependent on the idea of religion. (similarity 0.86)
• The secular cannot be conceived without the category of religion. (similarity 0.86)
• The secular is a contingent doctrine, not an emancipation from religion (similarity 0.86)
• Secularism’s contested meaning turns on its relation to ontology and epistemology. (similarity 0.85)
• Secularism claims to have generated tolerant modern religion (similarity 0.85)
• Secular modernity paradoxically claims to have produced the religion it excludes. (similarity 0.84)
• Church-state separation alone does not constitute secularism as a distinct doctrine. (similarity 0.84)
• Church-state separation alone does not define secularism’s novelty (similarity 0.84)
• The secular is neither a continuation nor a negation of the religious. (similarity 0.84)
• Secular liberalism admits religion publicly only if it abandons coercion for persuasion (similarity 0.84)
• The religious and secular are not essentially fixed categories. (similarity 0.83)
• Liberalism’s secular myth resembles but differs from Christian redemptive myth. (similarity 0.83)
• Liberal tolerance of religion extends only to religions accepting liberal discursive assumptions (similarity 0.83)