True Secularist

Do religion and politics mix? It's a question Nicholas Sarkozy has answered in the affirmative--and he's been criticized for it. Secularism, however, doesn't necessarily rebuff religion in public life, but protects it, argues Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. Although Sarkozy's public support of religion may sound to some ears like a throwback to the past, it might also be forward-looking. Wolfe, who is also professor of political science and author of "Does American Democracy Still Work?" and other books on religion and politics in America spoke with NEWSWEEK's Lily Huang. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What does secularism really mean?
Alan Wolfe: Secularism has a couple of meanings. It's often used to mean "not religious," but that's incorrect. "Nonreligious" is the opposite of "religious." "Secular" is actually a religious idea. It's the idea that there's a separate realm for religion, separate from politics or from political authority. And in that sense, it's a way of imagining not a lack of religion but a particular kind of religion, a religion that's based upon voluntarism, upon an individual's own choice--a religion that serves individual needs.

It sounds like secularism has more to do with religious pluralism.
It usually accompanies religious pluralism, but it's not the same thing. You can have secularism without pluralism. Secularism really comes down to the idea of viewing religion and politics as separate spheres, as opposed to the 17th- and 18th-century notion of the king having his political authority stemming directly from God … that a monarch's political authority is ultimately theological, rooted in God's authority. Secularism rejects that idea and establishes two realms: there's a realm of godly authority, but there's also a realm of political authority. So the United States is formally a secular society but has a great deal of religious activity.

That makes Sarkozy's "positive secularism" sound redundant.
In a sense, yes. In France, secularism came into being in 1905 with a formal separation of religious and political authority. That framework does allow for religion to flourish in a particular manner, and Sarkozy is operating very much within [that] understanding.

But should we think about this differently at a time when religious fundamentalism poses the greatest threat to world stability?
It depends on what kind of religious fundamentalism we're talking about. In the United States, the preponderance of the people we call evangelicals are not really fundamentalists. They come from a tradition of dissent, actually--a tradition that, in a sense, honors the principle of religious liberty. So, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention--the largest conservative Protestant religion in America--has a long history of supporting separation of church and state. It is the kind of religion that flourishes under modern secular conditions. In some places, though, fundamentalists do try to grab state power, and there certainly are fundamentalists in the United States who would like to do that--people like Pat Robertson and James Dobson and so on. And they are a danger, not only to people who are not religious but to [these other] kinds of religion.

Some say that Sarkozy even encourages fundamentalism in France when he prescribes religion as an antidote to social unrest.
I wouldn't say it's encouraging fundamentalism. There's a difference between religion and specific religions. The dangers to liberal democracy come when a specific religion is established as having political authority. So, in European history, it's the Catholic Church in Catholic countries or it's the Calvinist Church in Holland. These were state churches that used political authority to undergird a particular religion. Once we start talking about generic religion, as Sarkozy is doing, or as even [President] Bush in this country does--religion in general--there's much less of a danger to liberal democratic values. Because it's a generic religion, it lacks the content of a specific religion. It's almost as if it's saying that it doesn't matter what religion you have as long as you're religious. In a funny way, if a president like Sarkozy says we need religion to undergird the social order, they're actually denigrating specific religions. Louis XIV or Marie Antoinette would be shocked at this idea of a general religion [laughs]. To them religion was Catholicism. Catholicism would support the monarchy and undergird the social order, not some generic mish-mash that lacks theological content.