Postsecular Studies

Lori Branch

The term “postsecular” has been used in a variety of ways since it appeared in the title of Philip Blond’s Post-Secular Philosophy (1998). At least four are important to distinguish: (i) a “Radical Orthodox” theological orientation such as Blond’s, pioneered at Cambridge in the 1990s; (ii) a political designation, as in Jürgen Habermas’s “Notes on a Post-Secular Society,” describing Europe as no longer homogenously secular and grappling to integrate religious citizens in the public sphere; (iii) a literary-historical designation, originating from John McClure’s Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007), identifying post-WWII literature more occupied with faith than the modernist fiction that preceded it; and (iv), the one that concerns us here, a descriptor of humanities and social science scholarship in what has been called the “religious turn.” This religious turn dates to the mid-1990s in philosophy, though it quickly became clear that parallel developments were germinating in other fields. Hent de Vries’s Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (1999) was an early monograph that connected the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida, characterized by a new openness to religion and recognition of the homologies between deconstruction and negative theology’s orientation toward God as sacred and other. In 2000, Slavoj Žižek published The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For, his first of half a dozen monographs on religion. At the American Academy of Religion meeting in Toronto in 2002, in the wake of his collected Acts of Religion, Derrida filled a ballroom with 2,000 eager listeners who, as John Caputo put it, “were not people who came to hear about the death of God … the ‘desire for God’ would be much better.”1 The trend de Vries identified might be understood to have culminated in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), a nearly 900-page account of the intellectual and social changes by which secular materialism became the “immanent frame” through which many Western people experience the world. In retrospect, McClure’s 1995 Modern Fiction Studies essay “Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality,” seems a harbinger of subsequent developments in literary studies, and in the wake of 9/11, new notes began to sound. In 2002, Graham Ward’s Blackwell Manifesto True Religion provided a gripping account of the connections between colony, capital, secularism, and the “production of the religious” from Columbus and Shakespeare to Luhrmann and Rushdie. In her 2003 MLA Presidential Address, Mary Louise Pratt urged “study[ing] secularism and religiosity from every viewpoint we can muster,” and on the occasion of Derrida’s death in 2004, Stanley Fish predicted in The Chronicle of Higher Education that religion would “succeed high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender, and class as the center of intellectual energy in the academy.”2 In 2006, English Language Notes produced the special issue “Literary History and the Religious Turn” (44.1), and intervening years have witnessed a steady growth of criticism in religious veins, indicated by awardwinning monographs across a range of literary-historical fields and approaches. Thematically this scholarship has included considerations of religious subjects in literature-epiphany, conversion, liturgy, heresy-as well as critical inquiries into a host of topics, from secularism outside and within religious thought, to the ways gender and national identities have been mediated by religious ones. It has also moved beyond the reduction of religion to the “opiate of the masses,” recovering histories of religious progressivism and generating potent syntheses of religious and literary-theoretical concerns: the modalities of belief in literature and interpretation; the erosion of the secular/religious binary and the knowledge/faith distinction on which it is based; the hospitality of texts to their others; and textual mediation not as obstacle to presence but as ground for freedom and relation across difference. The ability of these studies to generate compelling critical conversation has fueled flourishing new monograph series in this area, including Bloomsbury’s “New Directions in Religion and Literature,” Ohio State University Press’s “Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies,” and Baylor University Press’s list across several series. The three major scholarly journals dedicated to literature and religion-Religion & Literature, Literature & Theology, and Christianity and Literature-have also contributed to the vibrancy of the field. Under the new editorship of Susannah Monta, Religion & Literature published a landmark special issue (41.2, 2009 [2010]) of thirty-four commissioned essays on the nature of the field, articulating practices and rationales for new work, followed in the next issue by a forum on “Locating the Postsecular.”3 In London in July 2011, all three journals collaborated for the first time in staging the international conference “The Hospitable Text: New Approaches to Religion and Literature,” at which then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams gave the keynote lecture. All of which, like this handbook and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion, testifies to a fertile field under significant cultivation. The religious turn has not taken place without opposition, however. Witness those thirtyfour essays in R&L, in which scholars repeatedly reference pressures against their work, especially the assumptions that religious faith is precluded by a commitment to the evident truths of critical theory-be they Marxist, feminist, or psychoanalytic-as they are borne out in literature, or that religion is simply irrelevant or boring: indictments one can hardly make respectably about any other facet of human life. It is not hard to see how such attitudes work to isolate postsecular inquiry from mainstream literary studies, limiting dissertation topics, scholarly publications, and hiring patterns. Laura Levitt, Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies and Gender and director of the Women’s Studies Program at Temple University, marvels at “how difficult it is” still in 2010 “to read for religion in contemporary literary criticism.”

Postsecular Studies

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