Post-secularity and (global) politics: a need for radical redefinition

Abstract The past two decades have produced a bulky literature on religion and politics, with many writers being influenced by Habermas's notion of ‘post-secularity’. However, despite the vast amount of literature, there is still little agreement on the meaning of this term. The article explores two main directions in which the expression has been interpreted: one direction where religious faith is in a way ‘secularised’ by being adapted to modern secular discourse; and another where faith triumphs over secularity by expunging its modern corollaries. What surfaces behind this divergence is a version of the immanence/transcendence conundrum which accentuates a presumed contrast of language games in which one linguistic idiom is said to be more readily accessible than the other. In agreement with Charles Taylor, this article challenges the assumption of an ‘epistemic break’ between secular reason and ‘non-rational’ religious discourse. Once this challenge is taken seriously, a new and more radical redefinition of ‘post-secularity’ comes into view: a definition where the prefix ‘post’ signifies neither a secular nor a religious triumphalism, but rather an ethical-political task: the task of liberating public life from its attachment to ‘worldly’ self- interest and the unmitigated pursuit of wealth, power, and military adventures.