Considering secularism

This discussion brings to mind a debate which continues to simmer, albeit quietly, in my otherwise fairly peaceful home. My husband and I are neither of us religious, though we are both the products, to a certain extent, of religious upbringings (I more than he). The question is, should our children be exposed to, or instructed in, religion? If so, which one? I contend that Christianity is so embedded in Western culture that we cannot fail to educate them about it; that our cultural and even our personal histories rest largely upon this tradition. He counters that they don’t need exposure to religion, and, if they are going to learn about it, why not some other religion? Why Christianity? And, if Christianity, should we go with Catholic (his background) or Protestant (mine)? I continue to assert that, while cultural sensitivity to other religions is of the utmost importance, we ought to convey, as best we can, a sense of the tradition from which we, their parents, derive. So, the children were baptized (in Protestant churches, to placate my father), and we have not proceeded much further (though at least they are no longer asking, during religious family functions, “Mommy, who’s Jesus?”).

I suppose what I’m grappling with here is, in the terms of Asad’s argument, the “Western conceit of the self-owning individual presumed free from all forms of coercion, including those potentially entailed in religion” (14-15). I would certainly concur with Camille’s friend in her strenuous support of the separation between church and state--I refused to send the children to their designated public school because it runs a Christian stream alongside its regular one--but I just as readily agree with Camille that secular critique can easily become culturally callous. Wendy Brown explains that the Western critical tradition prides itself on supplanting “the religious, the ideal, the unreal, the speculative, and the divine” with “the rational, material, real, scientific, and human” (13). However, as this volume makes clear, such a binary quickly loses its purchase when intellectuals begin to question Western “presumptions to monopolize the fact, meaning, and content of secularism, rationalism, freedom, and even democracy” (13). All we achieve, in thinking we are now somehow ‘free’ of the religious underpinnings of Western culture, is the construction of a fundamentalist, extremist Other; as Mahmood puts it, “either one is against secular values or for them” (65). Taking up Anabelle’s point, I wonder just how aware most of us are of the influence of the Judeo-Christian narrative on our putatively secular existence and critical practice. It seems, from reading this text, that a lack of awareness carries serious consequences.