Important books are not always (or often) good ones; rarer still are they pleasures to read. Yet Liberalism’s Religion is all of these. In it, Cecile Laborde shows that the shape of the debate about religion in analytic political philosophy since the 1990s is no longer tenable and charts a more plausible path forward. Laborde succeeds because she has the temerity not simply to talk to—but sympathetically engage—theorists of critical religion, postcolonial and conservative, who have become some of liberalism’s staunchest critics.

Laborde traces the book’s origins to a sabbatical year spent at Princeton in the company of several leading lights of the critical religion school, including the late Saba Mahmood (Liberalism’s Religion, 323). Thus, she demonstrates that liberal egalitarians have little to lose and much to gain from serious engagement with their opponents. The book itself stands as a gentle rebuke to both sides for avoiding it for so long. The disinclination to do so hitherto stems, I think, from liberal theorists’ fears that the critics may be right: that is, that if one were to confront seriously liberalism’s historical and conceptual origins, one must recognize it as both a product and instrument of Western hegemony, imperialism, and Protestant mission. And thus, for all of our talk about justice, equality, and justification, liberals remain (at best) unwitting handmaidens of global injustice and oppression.

Laborde quickly dispenses with the more trivial versions of this critique as instances of the genetic fallacy (16–17). Furthermore, she notes that critical religionists continue to rely on principles of justice, fairness, equality, and individual liberty for the normative force of their critiques—that is, precisely the “liberal” principles the universal authority of which they seek to deny. Liberalism may well be a civilizing and/or Protestantizing discourse of power. Still, not all civilizing discourses are created equal. Laborde argues that the onus remains on critics to suggest alternative arrangements that would be less, or at least not more, vulnerable to their critique than liberal egalitarianism.

Still, Laborde concedes that in their more sophisticated versions, the “realist” and “Protestant” critics of liberalism’s religion are basically right. For too long liberal political theorists have gotten away with the self-congratulatory conceit that the liberal egalitarian perspective stands somehow “above” or apart from others as uniquely transcendent or neutral, and thus not itself party to the disputes it proposes to resolve, always magnanimously, on its own terms. This conceit—skewered memorably by Stanley Fish, among others1—has always been as fanciful as it is frustrating, and Laborde argues persuasively that liberals cannot and should not avoid taking a stand on the issues of ethical salience and meta-jurisdictional authority on which critics like Fish and Winnifred Sullivan have pressed them. Liberalism’s Religion specifies several concrete ways how this might be done.

Underlying all of Laborde’s suggestions, however, is a more fundamental counsel to epistemic humility. Liberal egalitarian or no, she urges fellow political theorists to recognize the inevitable partiality of their own perspective—not as a prelude to rejection, but to further reflection and robust reformulation. On this view, the purpose of critique is to acknowledge the parochialism of one’s own commitments so as to become a more persuasive evangelist for them.

I agree with her conclusions. Of course, the provocatively religious language of parochialism and evangelism is mine, not Laborde’s. Still, I think it is the right language, and in what follows I will reflect briefly as a historian of political thought on the theme of parochialism in political theory as it arises in her wonderful book: pointing to the places where Laborde effectively recognizes it in her own liberal egalitarianism, and to highlight one place where it seems to me she does not.

From Province to Parish

For most theorists, who consider themselves a broad-minded bunch, to call someone “parochial” is to imply that they are somehow narrow or backward—that they “fail to see beyond the smoke of their own Chimneys,” as John Locke put it, and so mistake their own local horizon for that of human possibility.2 For Locke, problems arise when one’s limited perspective and natural partiality combine, leading her to mistake the prejudices of a particular place or parish for “innate ideas” or the universal consensus of mankind. (Laborde suggests that some more glib appeals to liberal neutrality are guilty of this mistake.)

But like the adjective “provincial,” “parochial” has a descriptive, as well as a pejorative sense, meaning simply “of or belonging to the parish” as a unit of local governance.3 Indeed, what distinguishes the parish from other locales—and makes it particularly relevant to Laborde’s book—is its status as a unit of civil, as well as ecclesiastical, government, and that the latter character proceeded the former in historically revealing ways. Parishes developed in England in the seventh and eighth centuries as large territorial units overseen by a single secular minister (“secular” here meaning a member of the Christian clergy not confined to a monastery or a particular order). Over time, these larger units were broken down into smaller ones focused around a single church, giving parishes a well-defined places both geographically and administratively, within the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy. With such well-organized units of pastoral care in place, the state soon took advantage. At the Reformation, the centralizing Tudor monarchy began to use the parish as the smallest unit of local government, above all in the administration of the Poor Law and the “registration” of individuals, a system that remained intact until further reforms in the 1830s.

To call liberal egalitarianism or any political theory “parochial,” then, need not be controversial. If all governance is local, at some point theory must meet practice, which is inevitably the practice of some particular place. Laborde reminds liberal egalitarians of the variety of practices to which their theories can be (and have been) accommodated through her contrast between “Secularia” and “Divinitia.” Both societies, she argues, meet the liberal egalitarian criteria of justifiability, inclusion, and liberty; hence, “both are legitimate liberal states . . . [and] in practice, liberal democratic states exhibit features of both” (152). Liberal objections to the latter are thus not principled but parochial, less a matter of argument than a lack of imagination about the practices that our theories might actually entail.

But practice informs theory, too; thus parochialism intervenes at the level of a theory’s conceptual inputs as well as its outputs. As Laborde acknowledges in passing, one sees this in the rise of liberal egalitarianism itself, which was led by two New Englanders, Rawls and Dworkin, who came of age intellectually in the 1960s and tended to view the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren as the telos of liberal democracy (28). To point to this context is not to debunk their theories—it is, however, to suggest that experiences of that particular local context shaped both the formulation of the political problem, as well as its imagined solutions.

We might thus think of the theorist’s parish as the historically specific practical-institutional context that supplies the unacknowledged constraints of the obvious (to us) and the basic assumptions or fundamenta upon which we construct our solutions. As Locke pointed out, it is one’s experience of the parish that shapes what principles one takes to be intuitive. In analytic political philosophy, such intuitions or judgments are not determinative; nevertheless, they exercise an important steering function in the inquiry. Recognizing this fact is particularly important in debates about religion, given the consistent liberal egalitarian maneuver, described by Laborde, of trying to resolve the argument by appealing to some more fundamental (and presumptively noncontroversial) principle. (Take, for example, Rawls’s reduction of religious toleration to a liberty of conscience, or Dworkin’s peculiarly American resort to freedom of expression.)

More particularly, discussions of religion in analytic political philosophy tend to wear their early modern English origins on their sleeve. Laborde’s substantive engagement with historians like Benjamin Kaplan highlights how consistently this history is reflected in theorists’ technical language. Take, for example, theorists’ preference for the early modern coinage “toleration” (as opposed to “tolerance”), or our discussions of “disestablishment,” “conscience,” and “nonconformity.” Theorists debate how much “latitude” (a good, early modern word you don’t hear much outside of debates in analytic political philosophy) should be afforded to “dissent”—and disagree about whether claims of conscience should extend to “indifferent” differences or only “fundamental” ones.

One might object here that the early modern resonances of theorists’ technical vocabulary simply reflect the fact that modern English is largely a product of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and analytic political philosophy remains a persistently Anglophone pursuit. Fair enough. But words carry their histories with them, and in this case, it is a history of an established national church (the Church of England) that has, for centuries, debated just how much religious difference it could accommodate both within and without, and how to treat dissenting (literally, “disagreeing”) members whom they were determined to keep within the fold.

While others may emphasize the (French) republican strands of her argument, I think that Laborde’s preference for the term “nonestablishment” over “disestablishment” reflects her sensitivity to the parochialism of theorists’ language, which continues to purvey the power of concepts generated in the statist-confessional English ecclesiastical context. Still, that context continues to shape how theorists (including Laborde) understand the problem of toleration itself: namely, as a matter of accommodating individual or small-scale associational dissent from within an established church. Thus, characterizing religious difference as “dissent” in the first place presupposes (theoretically and practically) a secure, recognizable, and national ethico-political establishment to which—and within which—individuals who cannot consent may choose to conform or not.4

Elsewhere, I have argued that the “basic” liberties to which liberal egalitarians appeal—that is, the particular constellation of free exercise, association, and speech, along with the demand for church-state separation—is itself the product of a particular history and theology.5 Specifically, it reflects the ecclesiology of radical Protestant separatists (that is disestablishmentarian sectarians) and evangelical Christians like Roger Williams of Rhode Island, who began as and strongly identified originally as “puritan” dissenters within a “polluted” national church.

Critical religion theorists like Mahmood never tired of pointing out what they saw as the implicit “Protestantism” of liberal political theory’s concept of religion, as a highly individual and voluntarist matter of conscientious belief, often tracing this back to liberalism’s presumptive “origins” in John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration. Laborde rightly points out the limitations of this critique, especially as a characterization of Locke’s views—and Protestantism is, after all, a very various phenomenon. Still, I think a deeper critical point remains. To point out the particularity and parochialism of liberal egalitarianism’s fundamenta is not to commit the genetic fallacy, or to mistake one’s historical critique for a philosophical one. Rather, it is to use genealogy as a counsel to humility, to remind the theorist that she remains a particular person theorizing from and within a particular place and time, and so not to mistake her own horizon for the limits of the possible.

On this view, liberal egalitarians like Laborde are not so much “rootless” but emphatically rooted cosmopolitans, whose parish is not bounded geographically, but rather intellectually and institutionally through shared sacred texts (both the American Bill of Rights and the ECHR), elite (often Anglophone) academic institutions which credential the young people who populate those international institutions, and preach the virtues of an individualistic ethos that valorizes conscientious dissent. That these parochial institutions function as inputs as well as outputs in our theories is to be expected. What frustrates liberalism’s critics, then, is our apparent obliviousness to that fact, and the carelessness with which we sometimes turn political theory into itself an established form of disestablishmentarian Protestantism.

Evangelism and Integrity

But are we really so oblivious? Here, I agree with Laborde. The appropriate response to critics’ frustrations and charges of liberal parochialism is not denial or recourse to neutrality. Rather, liberal theorists would do better to recognize the parochialism of our commitments and then decide whether or not to defend them—not as neutral, but as better and truer than the alternatives. To put it provocatively (and in terms Laborde would reject): we should become evangelists for our received faith to its critics and enemies.

Laborde derives her own preferred arrangements from her self-conscious sense of belonging to an imagined cosmopolitan community of Western secular democracies, in which the fundamenta are civil supremacy, democratic sovereignty, and individual rights. Yet, while Liberalism’s Religion fruitfully exhibits and challenges the parochialism of liberal egalitarianism by turns, she resists the evangelical implication. Indeed, the point of her book is to argue that, by dispensing with the concept of religion in the way she prescribes, liberal egalitarianism can assuage critics’ fears that “liberalism, far from being a potentially universal framework for the democratic and fair resolution of conflicts about religion, is in fact the sectarian, comprehensive ideology of Western progressives—[i.e.,] the religion of liberals” (242).

This is inspiring. Yet there are moments in her argument where Laborde appears as an evangelist for the “religion of liberals,” after all. Consider the concept of “integrity” that she (following Dworkin) seeks to elevate as one of the ultimate values that liberalism seeks to protect in accommodating religious difference, “where integrity is defined as congruence between one’s perceptions of one’s duties and one’s actual actions” (64). The conclusion that in a tolerant society, one’s outsides should be an accurate reflection of one’s insides is one Locke himself came to in his Letter (1689). After demonizing so-called “fanatics” in his early anti-toleration Tracts on Government (c. 1660–62), Locke would later argue that dissenters were often better citizens and more trustworthy than conformists, because they demonstrated their integrity by their willingness to suffer for their beliefs. (“Insincere” Catholics and atheists were another matter.)

Yet Laborde’s suggestion that integrity is a value that liberals and non-liberals, religious and secular, citizens can agree on is itself the product of a particular history, suggesting that we have not quite escaped the parish after all. The word is another early modern English coinage, derived from the Latin integritas, meaning wholeness, completeness, or purity.6 Its first recorded use was in 1533 by none other than Thomas More, who martyred himself so that he (as one younger contemporary put it) “might reserve the integritie of a good conscience.”7

Interestingly, the dawn of liberal egalitarianism in political theory coincided with Robert Bolt’s portrayal of More in A Man for All Seasons (1966), a play that had reimagined More a decade earlier as a hero for agnostics in a nuclear age. As a model of the conscientious objector as a man of integrity, it is no accident that the film swept the Oscars in 1966 as the debate over conscientious objection to the war in Vietnam was at its peak. Muhammad Ali would be convicted of dodging the draft that same year, a conviction overturned unanimously by the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren in 1967.

The assumption that the “integrity” of the conscientious objector should be viewed as universally admirable, let alone acceptable—as well as the idea that it is readily secularizable, as it was not in the Ali case—seems to be very much a product of this particular historical moment. But as Roger Williams and other early modern disestablishmentarian defenders of toleration remind us, the success of a tolerant society hinges in no small part on the willingness of the vast majority of its members to be hypocrites, and to lack integrity—that is, not to act on their inward spiritual convictions—when it came to sharing a civil society with those they regarded as culpably erroneous and impure.

In valorizing integrity and the emblem of the heroic dissenter, liberal theorists like Laborde continue to work with a romanticized view of dissent that risks forgetting the hard-won early modern insight that tolerant societies demand divided selves, and that in our daily encounters with difference we must continue to hold two thoughts at once: I hate these people and yet I have to live with them. There will always be something paradoxical about liberal efforts to establish an ethic, let alone a politics, of dissent; yet liberal egalitarianism, even in Laborde’s much improved form, still has little to say about what the institutionalization of dissent demands from others in order to be workable on the scale of society.

And so, while I agree with Laborde that liberalism is not a religion, I do think it has functioned—and will continue to function—as an established church. Within this establishment, dissent can be admirable as well as permissible, so long as it knows its place. Thus I suspect that disaggregating religion, as Laborde advises, will not suffice to free us from the theological—or more precisely, the ecclesiological and soteriological—assumptions about what counts as a righteous (or justifiable) life, or the parochial establishments that make dissent possible, and tolerable.

Let me end, then, on an appropriately parochial note: when More, that paradigmatic man of integrity, coined the term in English, he was not speaking of the integrity or wholeness of the body and soul of man, but of the divine and material natures of Christ in the sacrament of communion.8 How fitting would it be to find that we members of Liberalism’s parish have been arguing about the Eucharist all along!

While political theory is not my own mode of inquiry, I find Cécile Laborde irresistible as an interlocutor. Her generosity is infecting, her comparative modesty of ambition enormously refreshing. She is almost entirely free of condescension towards those with whom she disagrees. These are not small matters. She seeks to sell her brand of liberalism but she does not insist that it is the only game in town. She invites conversation.

What I take to be Cécile’s purpose in this book is to give an account of how political liberalism, in its practices with respect to religion, and in its defense of those practices, might more carefully and competently acknowledge the critique of religion scholars. She does this by way of her particular invention, the political and legal disaggregation of religion. Seeking to revise the defense of political liberalism in the face of those whom she brings together under the heading “critical religion,” she acknowledges that one difficulty with previous accounts of liberalism has been an insufficiently complex description of religion. Disaggregating religion permits her to more carefully fine-tune liberal doctrine to meet its critics. It is fascinating to watch her do this. It does not, however, lead her to cede any ground on the core liberal commitment to moral individualism and voluntarism. Those are nonnegotiable, even while she acknowledges the violence done in their name.

Laborde divides the criticism by the religionists into three types, the semantic, the Protestant, and the realist. Taking each in turn, she acknowledges liberal failings while insisting that matters can be at least partially repaired. They can be repaired insofar as they help liberalism to recognize its own blind spots. Let me underline this point. Laborde’s goal is to fix liberalism, not to give a better account of religion. That is our job.

My own work appears in this introduction as one among a group of critics. While each of us might push back on her readings of our work, in general she is a careful and generous reader. More than most liberal legal thinkers. I have recently had more than one conversation with those in legal studies who write about religion. I have asked, “How did you get interested in religion?” The startled response has been, “I am not interested in religion.” Cécile is. We are flattered. However, while she is interested, she is not persuaded.

It is when she turns to law that hard edges begin to appear. As she underlines in her chapter on associational autonomy, “What [liberal egalitarians] mean by ‘secular’ is that it is a state that has the prerogative to authoritatively determine the respective spheres of the political and the religious—it enjoys meta-jurisdictional sovereignty.” She adds that “liberal egalitarians . . . have not been sufficiently forthcoming about this” (162). It is her intention to be forthcoming. I am grateful for the clarity and honesty of her position but I am not persuaded. I am not persuaded that religion has nothing more fundamental to offer as critique—that liberal sovereignty itself is not properly in need of revision.

Doubling down on the exclusiveness of state sovereignty rests on Laborde’s judgment that the benefit to the individual and to the public welfare of insisting on the state’s exclusive competence at adjudicating its own jurisdiction outstrips the harm done in its name. Associational autonomy is thus necessarily limited by the state’s right to determine the scope of that autonomy. Again Laborde:

The radicalism of liberalism . . . lies in the fact that it assumes state sovereignty: the state’s prerogative to decisively fix and enforce the terms of the social contract. Secular liberalism assumes that reasonable individuals have a higher-order interest in living under political justice on this earth . . . rather than living by the word of God. . . . This is not a trivial assumption. (163)

She takes most of her critics to agree with this (169). The radicalism of religion does not get much of a hearing here.

Yet this position, that political justice on this earth is best served through the exclusive sovereignty of the modern state, and that religion is best understood as an otherworldly project best characterized as “living by the word of God,” is contested in many places today. On the one hand, the benefits of such exclusive sovereignty is belied by the multiple failures of modern states today, to effectively feed, clothe, and provide healthcare to those in their care, to monopolize violence, to maintain their borders, to address climate change or to successfully tax their richest citizens, corporate and otherwise. Local and transnational efforts in all these areas by establishment actors such as multinational corporations and global religious communities, as well as by entrepreneurial start-ups, constantly erode the state’s claims to sovereignty. The efforts of the order of states through their international institutions to enforce their individual sovereignty through collective effort is likewise unimpressive.

These failures are manifest in the work of the religion critics Laborde cites. With respect to religion, what might be termed religious alternatives to liberal law are inadequately described with dismissive references to divine law, to “living by the word of God,” including those from indigenous and other non-theistic communities, as well as those of various persuasions, religious and quasi-religious, including ecocentric ones, finding their primary normative orders elsewhere than civil courts. It is as if the warm welcome she gave us in chapter 1 has dissipated. Religion is once more confined by an earlier liberal tradition that she herself had critiqued as insufficiently attentive to the complexity of religion.

The very structure of Laborde’s book mutes the full effect of her critiques of liberalism’s law. As Laborde herself acknowledges in her response to another forum on this book, “the conceptual and genealogical questions I introduce in chapter 1 . . . are overshadowed by the substantive, normative questions I pursue in the rest of the book.” In other words, as her position on state sovereignty reveals, the religion critics of the first chapter are useful primarily as a heuristic. They are not permitted to infect and undermine liberal political theory speak, that is, “the substantive normative questions,” of the rest of the chapters. The many losses catalogued by critics of liberalism are lamented but never seriously considered as ways of life that might be respected as ethical and political choices which address and challenge the substantive normative questions posed by liberal political theory. Over and over again, the lively and visceral objections offered by critics to evoke the alternative religious and political realities of non-liberal forms is translated into the language of liberalism, robbing them of their existential claim. This is one effect, unintended, perhaps, of disaggregation. Dismembered, they are reduced to fighting on like the black knight of Monty Python fame.

Repeatedly, religious claims to communal autonomy are marginalized, reduced to struggling efforts at survival in and amongst the assumed indispensability of liberal institutions—this reduction always made in the name of justice in this world, rather than the next, notwithstanding abundant evidence that these communities do indeed seek justice in this world. Liberalism does not have a monopoly on that project. (See, for example, Jinnealogy, a recent book by anthropologist Anand Taneja showing us religio-legal life among the ruins of Delhi, a life that seeks justice in the face of the failures of the postcolonial state.)

Ruling communal religion illegal does not only have the effect of doing violence to its members. Such rulings in the name of moral individualism and voluntarism arguably fail to recognize the inescapability of communalism. They fail to recognize the communalism of the liberal state itself as well as the privileged forms of sovereignty that flourish in it, including those of the church, the university, and the corporation.

In her new book, Powers of Distinction, philosopher of religion Nancy Levene insists that “all human life takes place in collectivities. The question is how to value them” (103). By “value” I take her to mean at once the need for cherishing and the need for evaluation. She embodies the complexity of this dual task in the story of Abraham, boldly claiming him as the exemplar of the modern:

Modernity is Abram insofar as he leaves his kin and clan, his land for another land. This event makes him Abraham, father of a multitude. The call is not only that he leave his land, it is that he leave his land for another one. In leaving his land, he is going somewhere and not nowhere, not toward an abstraction or toward the empyrean or simply to wander the earth. But then the new land, the promised land, will be no less subject to the original call—that it not become yet another homeland. (100)

“Modernity is a reformation of the collective,” she says. You must leave your family and your home. You must go somewhere. But that place must also be a place you value in both senses. You must evaluate it and you must cherish it. It must not “become yet another homeland” (101).

Reforming the collective is going to take all of us. Ruling out the religious has not proven effective. For all of the reasons the religion critics Laborde cites espouse, semantic, protestant, and realist, separation has proved impossible. Pluralist understandings of law seem to be the only way forward.1 If we turn from religion’s critics to law’s critics, imagining law beyond the sovereignty of the liberal state, a cross-disciplinary alliance might prove fruitful.

Before commenting directly on Liberalism’s Religion, I want to line up three moments in legal history that will be familiar to all of you. My first exhibit consists of the two conscientious objector cases, United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163 (1965), and Welsh v. United States, 578 U.S. __ (1970). These cases center on the language of §6(j) of the 1958 Universal Military Training and Service Act. §6(j) identifies those who are eligible for the status of conscientious objector. It says that objectors will be exempt from military service if their objection is based on “religious training and belief,” and religious training and belief are immediately defined: “Religious training and belief means the individual’s belief in relation to a Supreme Being involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation, but does not include essentially political, sociological, or philosophic views or a merely personal moral code.” So, according to the act, to qualify for an exemption you must believe in a God whose commands supersede the commands of any earthly authority; and that belief must be acquired in the course of training that is presumably administered by something like a church which comes complete with doctrines, rituals, ecclesiastical hierarchies, criteria for entry and expulsion, and so on.

What the court does in Seeger and Welsh is relax 6(j)’s severe requirement and let in everything that had been excluded. It does this by coming up with a new test for conscientious objection, “namely, does the claimed belief occupy the same place in the life of an objector as an orthodox belief in God holds in the life of one clearly qualified for exemption.” So, in the wake of these two decisions, political, philosophical, and merely personal views count as the possible basis for exemption. Justice Harlan concurs in both Seeger and Welsh, but his concurrence in Welsh is uneasy because, as he says, by dissolving the “distinction between theistic and non-theistic,” the court “has performed a lobotomy and completely transformed the statute.” By lobotomy, Harlan means that the court has cut the essential part of §6(j) out of what he calls “a remarkable feat of judicial surgery.” What has been cut out according to Harlan is the “theistic requirement,” that is, the requirement that the conscientious objector must believe in a God whose commands are superior to the commands of any earthly authority. In the words of an old television commercial, Harlan is complaining “Where’s the beef?”

The same question was posed by Justice Wiley Rutledge in his dissent to the majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education 330 U.S. 1 (1947), regarded as the first significant Establishment Clause case. In that case, as you all know, after celebrating in stirring language the wall of separation between church and state and insisting that it never be breached, Justice Black immediately breached it when he concluded that the state of New Jersey was justified in reimbursing Catholic parents for bus fares expended in order to send their children to school. In his Remonstrance and Remembrance, James Madison had famously thundered that not even three pence be spent by the state in support of religious institutions. How does New Jersey get around the three pence rule? The answer is by turning an Establishment Clause case—where the proper question is, does the expenditure by the state aid a religious institution?—into a Free Expression case—where the question is, are the parties being treated equally or evenhandedly? By invoking the criterion of evenhandedness, Black elided the issue that had brought the case to the court’s attention in the first place—the relationship between state monies and the advance of religion. Parents reimbursed for expenses incurred while sending their children to a parochial school were put in the same category as parents reimbursed for expenses incurred while sending their children to public school. The religious identity of the persons was simply ignored and made beside the point. In his dissent, Justice Rutledge complained that “by casting the issue in terms of promoting the general cause of education,” the court “ignores the religious factor, thereby leaving out the only vital element in the case.” What he means is that the case would not have come before the court were it not for the “religious factor,” and eliminating that factor as the basis of consideration leaves open the question of why the case is being considered at all.

So, Rutledge’s complaint that the Everson majority leaves out the only vital element—religion—and Harlan’s complaint that Seeger and Welsh decisions perform a surgical lobotomy when the distinction between theism and non-theism disappears are pretty much equivalent. The same surgical excision was performed by Felix Cohen in his famous and, to my mind, brilliant and delightful essay Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach. In order to illustrate what he means by “the functional approach,” Cohen turns to the topic of religion and writes, “The functional approach has meant a shift of emphasis away from concern with the genesis and evolution of various religions and toward a study of the consequences of various religious beliefs in terms of human motivation and social structure.” He adds that for the functional approach, the significance of religion “is found not in a system of theological propositions but in a mode of human conduct,” of which the functional approach “demands objective description.” Thus, you ask of every aspect of religion, “How does it work? How does it serve to mold men’s lives, to deter from certain avenues of conduct and expression, to sanction accepted patterns of behavior . . . to induce social solidarity?” Answers to these questions will help you make distinctions between the behavior patterns of self-described believers and the behavior patterns of non-believers. They will say nothing, however, about what it means to be a believer or what a believer believes in. The distinction could as well be between beavers and chipmunks. To quote Rutledge again, what has been left out of this account of religious behavior is “the religion factor.” And to return for a moment to Harlan’s concurrence in Welsh, what Cohen has done is perform a lobotomy by studying behavior while excising any reference to what behavior is impelled by. It is as if you observe the behavior patterns of football players apart from the goal that gives the patterns significance and meaning. Two men move five feet to the left and another man dropped back ten feet. Yeah, so?

In Liberalism’s Religion, Cécile Laborde does exactly what Cohen, the Welsh majority opinion, and the majority in Everson do: she considers religion’s relationship to the state, but she begins by bracketing the commitments that account for the fervor of strong believers. She wants to make an argument for including religious reasons in public deliberations. But she excepts from the category of acceptable religious reasons those reasons that have their source in divine authority or “the personal experience of revelation.” So, “reasons of the type ‘God wants us to do X’ or ‘the scriptures tell us to do X’ have no part in public deliberations,” but once you set aside these instances of “religious reasons stricto sensu, religious language is not different from secular language.” True, it is not different, but that is because religious language has been emptied of its religious content. When Laborde rejects religious reasons stricto sensu, strictly speaking, she is rejecting the only reasons religious believers are interested in and committed to. Her conclusion is at once correct and revealing: “Many religiously inspired concerns, stripped of their theological . . . and authority-based claims, survive in the public reason of liberal democratic societies.” Survive as what? Survive because these reasons have been carefully detached from any basic religious claim and can be safely allowed into the area of secular deliberation. One can then argue that there is nothing special about religion because everything that is special has been discounted and bracketed. “Liberal egalitarian philosophers have been able to bypass debates about the category of religion.” Yes, they have, because they have generalized the category of religion to a point where its specificity and its specific claims disappear. The universalism of strong religious assertion has been replaced by a universalism in which no discourse is allowed to be strong.

Laborde calls this basic move of hers “disaggregation.” Disaggregation involves breaking down a whole into its constituent parts. Its advantage (and scandal) is that, detached from the whole, the orphan parts are now without an informing spirit; they could be parts of anything, which is fine with Laborde because it is her intention and desire to focus on pieces of behavior which, because the religion has been leeched out of them, can now be proclaimed as compatible with secular political practices and imperatives. When Laborde says that the chief argument of her book is that “we should disaggregate religion into a plurality of different interpretive dimensions,” she means we should take it apart in a way that removes from it its offending spirituality and removes too the claims that spirituality makes on those animated by it. Disaggregation elides the truth claims of theistic religions (the ones Laborde quarries for examples), and once this disaggregation is performed, religious practices can be discussed in relation to the secular practices they now resemble by subtraction. Religion is broadened “into a maximally inclusive category that comprises preferences, commitments, identities, beliefs, world views and so forth. Religion is not so much analogized with them as dissolved into them” and “when religion does not exhibit the features that make it impermissible as an object of state endorsement, then there is nothing wrong with the state endorsing it.” Yes, because as Justice Rutledge might have said, the religious factor has been exiled and religious discourse has thereby been cleaned up for use in public life.

Fairly late in her book, Laborde acknowledges the force of critique I have just offered. The liberal state, she concedes, that claims to do justice to religion begins by arrogating to itself the authority to say what religion is and what place it has in a democratic society. The liberal state, she declares, “is a sovereign secular state” which “assumes state sovereignty, the state’s prerogative to divisively fix and enforce terms of the social contract.” The liberal state does this, she continues, because of its assumption that “reasonable individuals have a higher order interest in living under political justice on this earth . . . rather than living by the word of God.” As she says, “This is not a trivial assumption.” Indeed, it is the whole ball of wax. In order to be accorded the adjective “reasonable,” religious persons must subordinate their religious commitments to a “higher order interest”; that is, they must trade their religion for liberalism’s religion. “Citizenship trumps religious commitment.” For whom? For religiously committed Rawlsians and other apostles of liberal pluralism, not for strong religious believers.

By emphasizing the phrase “reasonable individuals,” Laborde performs a familiar move in the liberal pluralist repertoire. Those who resist liberalism’s plea go along and get along—don’t insist too strictly on the universal relevance of your particular religious views—are labeled unreasonable or obdurate or just plain crazy. But in fact, there is absolutely no reason for devout persons to accept the disaggregation of their strongly held views and to replace them with the secular scripture of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas. I’m not saying anything that Laborde doesn’t know. Her point, and it is a good one, shared by legal thinkers as diverse as Antonin Scalia and Robert Post, is that taking the free exercise of religion too seriously and allowing religious imperatives to overwhelm the “higher order interest” in living cooperatively on this earth runs the risk and danger of undoing the liberal state and its commitment to pluralism. Laborde contends that “the onus is on critics of liberalism to explain how any political alternative might be defensible at all.” There is no viable political alternative: if the goal is to bring as many as possible under the umbrella, liberal egalitarianism may be the best we can do. But again, that is liberalism’s goal, not religion’s. All I ask, and it is a request Laborde has already granted, is that those who insist on the subordination of the religious spirit to the Rodney King spirit of “why can’t we just get along” acknowledge what they are doing, and acknowledge specifically that in their pluralist zeal they are not being fair to religion, but cutting religion out of the picture altogether.

Cécile Laborde bases her argument on a paradox: that liberal states founded upon the distinction of religious and secular domains bring them together the more they police this separation. She points out that the privileges of self-governance or conscientious objection initially given to particular churches become precedents for other religious or non-religious groups and practices. Similarly, the rights and protections offered the latter are extended to religious bodies, in a mixing of realms and jurisdictions produced by the universal claims of liberalism itself.

Recognizing the artificial and largely unworkable distinction between religion and non-religion as separate spheres mapped onto the equally ambiguous ones of public and private, Laborde recommends disaggregating the former to deal with its content on its own merits and without recourse to such formulaic categories. By the same token, however, she should call for the disaggregation of the secular or non-religious domain as well, for in both cases this interesting version of “disestablishment” increases the reach of each while at the same time restricting it.

Just as the disestablishment of the church, emancipation of Jews and privatization of religion put them at the heart of capitalism in Marx’s view, so, too, might the disaggregation of religion and the secular as demarcated spheres allow them to join hands in neoliberal societies, where capitalism has already fragmented such distinctions within a global arena governed by market logics. Whether or not it is a good thing, this development allows us to understand the “problem” of religion and the “crisis” of secularism in a new light.

What if we push Laborde’s insight further, to argue that today’s problem of religion and crisis of secularism result from the inability to distinguish between the two categories? That their disaggregation is only possible because argumentation on both sides is already liberal in character? Perhaps what we are seeing in contemporary debates about religion and secularism is a disavowal of religion’s absorption in liberalism, which now struggles to give secularism meaning by searching for a new dividing line in theology.

Laborde points out that the critical theorists of secularism are unable to offer any alternatives to a liberal order, and can only propound an internal critique of liberalism. But the same may be said of the apparently theological disputes over blasphemy, apostasy and the like, which today dominate all discussion of religion and secularism in Europe and increasingly North America as well. Not accidentally, these issues all have to do with Islam, which seems to have taken over the mantle of representing religion or “the theological” in these societies.

Interesting about the arguments made by “illiberal” Muslims to justify veiling women and segregating the sexes, banning images of Muhammad they consider offensive or the instituting sharia courts, is that they all make use of liberal rather than theological reasoning. However disingenuous, this reasoning stresses the importance of men and women’s free choice, the proscription of libelous or hate speech and the right to privacy. The religious terms used, such as blasphemy, are deployed by others, with Muslims referring to them while citing Christian precedents—such as the now-abrogated blasphemy law invoked by protestors against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1989.

This is true in Muslim countries as well, where citations of scripture are folded into liberal reasoning by courts. In Pakistan, for instance, the injunction disallowing Ahmadis from calling themselves Muslims or their places of worship mosques, takes copyright law as its precedent. Because Islam is the property of Muslims, then, its identifying names, sites, and practices cannot be appropriated by others. Similarly, in Indonesia, the long-standing non-Muslim practice of using the Arabic term “Allah” for God is disputed on the ground of communal ownership.

To understand religion as communal property, of course, is a perfectly liberal and even sacrilegious way of approaching it, with Muslims ostensibly only asking for their particular habits or prejudices to be included within existing juridical conceptions of free and proscribed speech, or privacy and individual choice. This is why the debates that rage over these issues have to do with determining whether or not a sartorial practice is truly free, and if a proscription of media content falls under defamation or violates freedom of expression. Sometimes the question is about intent and at other times about precedent.

The fact that Islam now serves to name all disputes about secularism and the liberal order in the West cannot be attributed to purely sociological or political developments having to do with immigration, crime, racism and terrorism. For Islam names the theological actor long missing from the scene. This is why the secular narrative is so invested in repeating its purported European history, with Islam said to require its own Reformation or Enlightenment. For without the theological element this narrative is superfluous, and the pluralism upon which liberalism is premised falls to the ground.

Unlike the critical theorists, I do not place much importance upon the “secularization” thesis of political theology as described by Carl Schmitt. The problem is not theology’s survival in secular institutions, which, for example, makes both “religion” and “secularism” into Christian categories, so much as its absence among those who are called upon to submit to them. Even the most egregiously violent claims to religious authority made in the name of Islam are unable in my view to escape the narrative of liberalism, and their extremism may even be attributed to the urgency as well as difficulty of doing so.

In any case despite all protestations to the contrary, these violent practices fail to conform to any conventionally liberal definition of religious practice as being “traditional,” existentially “deep” and therefore “meaningful.” Instead they might be transient and “shallow,” more like fashion than faith. This is precisely why they need so much buttressing, among the faithful as well as their critics, by copious references to scripture and history. How can such temporary and “superficial,” if existentially nevertheless weighted forms of religious practice or belief, be accommodated within a liberal framework that tends to define what is religious in terms of tradition? By pursuing the logic of disaggregation further to de-theologize such phenomena.

The “return” of religion and “crisis” of secularism, therefore, are not good ways of describing what is happening in our times. More interesting is the possibility that we are faced not with the increasing visibility and exacerbation of theological differences but rather their diminution. The true crisis is internal to liberalism, manifested by the disintegration of the pluralistic or qualitative distinction between public and private or secular and religious domains upon which it depends. This can even be seen in the displacement of pluralism by diversity as the defining shibboleth of neoliberal societies.

But why is secularism in Europe and North America so wedded to the qualitative distinctions of pluralism? The Indian philosopher Mohammad Iqbal argues early in the last century that such a distinction was itself theological, deriving from the Christian separation of the material and the spiritual, which he claimed was mapped onto the public and private in liberalism. Indian secularism, however, is not characterized by such a distinction, at least in part because its colonial history meant that the state was seen as foreign to a native society whose religious conflicts it was meant to adjudicate.

Instead of placing secularism’s caesura between state and society or public and private, in other words, Indians tend to locate it within interreligious relations that are themselves marked by devotion rather than doubt. There is no qualitative distinction between the public life of the state and the private world of religion, only a requirement of what the political philosopher Rajeev Bhargava calls “principled equidistance,” which means that the state must treat religious groups either with equal intimacy or distance. In such a situation “the theological” loses its specificity and so meaning.

Indian debates about secularism, indeed, do not refer to theology at all, let alone religion, but deploy instead the term “communalism” to describe the problem it addresses. And communalism, of course, is only quantitatively different from its standard opposite, nationalism, and not qualitatively so. Religion, in other words, has been deprived of its theological element in such discussions, and is treated as a problem simply because it is too narrow and so intolerant of others. Since independence, the antonym of communalism has gradually shifted from nationalism to secularism, but this latter still defines a broad and by no means irreligious culture rather than describing a juridical category.

As a vernacular category entrenched in social relations rather than the state, Indian secularism is both a deeply religious category without being a theological one. In fact, it was meant by thinkers like Gandhi to forestall the colonial state’s ability to turn religious communities into liberal interests. For this state had made a virtue out of necessity by interpreting its foreignness for neutrality and thus posing as a third-party arbitrating between India’s conflicting communities. Gandhi thought that in doing so the colonial state turned these groups into liberal interests that could only be mediated by it and so forever held apart and unable to come to any mutual agreement.

Such a liberal solution to the tensions produced by India’s diversity, however, only entrenched and intensified them in Gandhi’s view. And this was the case not least because such interests were derived from notions of private property, which made Hinduism or Islam into the property of their adherents. But the Mahatma recognized that violent as such a conception was, in a poor country like India property had not and could not define social relations as a whole. And he despaired of the violence that the attempt to make religions into liberal forms of property would entail.

Gandhi therefore tried to think about secularism without the liberal state and its politics of interest, thus making for unmediated relations between Indians that retained the religious fire of conviction and ideal. For it was only such ideals, themselves unavailable in liberalism and so always sought by it from the outside, whether in nationalism, populism or dictatorship, that were capable of ennobling people and making them perform great tasks like that of freeing their country from foreign rule. Liberal interests, he claimed, could never accomplish this, but rather prompted Indians to acquiesce to colonial rule in the first place.

For the Mahatma, then, the problem that secularism addressed was how to foster unmediated relations between religious communities while guaranteeing their nonviolent character. This was a genuine question, and one that has not yet received an adequate answer. My point is therefore not to praise Indian secularism over its Western peers, but show that it is possible to think about it in different ways. Crucial for my argument here is that these Indian debates do not presume the existence of something called “the theological” and so repudiate any qualitative distinction between it and “the secular.” And isn’t this the presumption that animates Laborde’s book?