Vyacheslav Karpov and Manfred Svensson, eds. 2020. Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration: Cross-Disciplinary Challenges to a Modern Myth. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Myth busting is its own genre of academic literature, into which Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration nicely fits. “Pluralism and tolerance,” as the editors quote the famous theologian Harvey Cox, “are the children of secularization” (2). The editors set out the myth—whose footnotes are ample, and whose literature is sprawling—straightaway and set the agenda to push back against this happy tale of secular progress. And yet there is no straw-manning here, no easy dismissal of secularization, as has too often been the fashion. The temptation, especially among more conservative-minded scholars, can be to reverse the argument entirely: that it is explicitly and exclusively religion that produces toleration. The story the editors steward is more complex. Citing celebrated historian Herbert Butterfield, they write that the tendency of too much modern scholarship is “to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present” (3). Here is the genius in balance and tone of this volume: it does not pick teams in the activist historical ransacking that passes as so much historiography today, but offers alternatives, pushes other plot lines, and asks harder questions about what, after all, we mean by the secular and by tolerance. It asks us to imagine a present that is not entirely uniform or homogeneous, and still—for that reason—very much in the making.
The cast of authors that they have gathered is extremely impressive, and the quality of nearly every chapter is outstanding. In the first part of the book, which tracks concepts of tolerance and dignity in figures that unsettle the secular myth—from Aquinas, Augustine, John Owen, Ibn 'Arabi, William Penn, Moses Mendelssohn, and even a Calvinist like Abraham Kuyper—the initiate as well as the expert will find much to learn. Reading these comparatively may even prove of pedagogical value in a university or graduate setting, the editors having with care offered us examples of Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish, and other figures.
The same strength of quality comes through in part 2, which while not historically or conceptually tight, does offer regional variation that, when read comparatively, yields a bounty of insight. Here there are chapters on early twentieth century Mexico, the rise of the Jewish state, Islam and religious freedom, religious freedom in American politics, China, the European Union, and Russia and Ukraine. The last chapter on Russia and Ukraine must stand out as of particular pragmatic interest given the events of 2022.
The strength of these disparate cases is in part because of the exceptional quality of the authors. Several chapters are distillations of much larger, celebrated works by their authors, and so serve usefully as on ramps to these conversations for initiates. But the cases also give wide historical, regional, and religious arguments to the deconstruction of the myth that secularization precedes tolerance and pluralism. In fact, as these chapters argue in sum, it is sometimes the case that secularization precedes intolerance and anti-pluralism, and it is sometimes, even often, the case that theology and religion catalyze the principles and practices of tolerance and the free society.
The weakness of the book is, of course, that same disparate nature of the chapters. The book is too academic to serve reasonably well as a popular introduction to myth-busting the secularization thesis, but too disparate and disconnected to serve in most conventional academic contexts, other than ones directly related to studying secularization and desecularization. I might, for example, assign George Harinck’s excellent summation of “Abraham Kuyper’s Vision of a Plural Society” to students in a seminar on Protestant political theology or assign Daniel Philpott’s enviably compact “Religious Liberty and the Muslim Question” to students in a seminar on comparative political Islam, but it would be a rare seminar or occasion when I would need both.
This is the weakness of many edited, academic volumes, beginning—as this one did—in a conference setting, which no doubt was a significant and exciting catalyst for its participants. It might have been helped by not only a smart introduction, which this book has, but also a substantial conclusion, which this book lacks. This weakness is, though, also what makes it such a rich, comparative read. It is not often—perhaps never—that the European Court of Human Rights, church-state conflict in Mexico, and the theory and practice of toleration of William Penn are pressed together into discussion. And this book proves that the rarity of such a combination is so much the pity. It succeeds, in a way, not only with its title, but also with its subtitle: that cross-disciplinary approaches to myth busting are not only serious, but essential. This reader is convinced, though I fear the book’s price and packaging will win fewer converts than its authors and editors deserve.
Robert J. Joustra
Redeemer University
rjoustra@redeemer.ca