The Unquiet Frontier

Abstract

There are many different diagnoses of what constitutes the “post-secular.” My own view is that it constitutes the unprecedented and paradoxical coexistence of two supposedly contradictory social, religious, and cultural trends: on the one hand, the persistence of secular objections to public religion and on the other, the novel re-emergence of religious actors in the global body politic. John Caputo’s much quoted aphorism — that God is dead, but so also is the death of God — captures this agonistic model of the post-secular, in which what we are looking at is not the revival of religion, or the reversion of secular modernity into a re-enchanted body politic, but something more unprecedented and complex. Yet it also means there is little in the way of agreed discourse about the nature of the public square and the legitimacy of religious reasoning within it. This article considers one possible model, that of “post-secular rapprochement,” as one way of envisaging how newly-emergent forms of religious activism and discourse might be mediated back into a pluralist public domain.