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  "path": "/2026/06/secularism-universal-to-the-west-provincial-to-everywhere-else/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-13T08:05:14.000Z",
  "site": "https://providencemag.com",
  "tags": [
    "Book Review",
    "Civilization",
    "Historical Theory",
    "History",
    "The Latest",
    "contradictory",
    "ideas",
    "Secularization",
    "clash"
  ],
  "textContent": "In the West many long-stable electoral patterns are disappearing. Centrist political parties have eroded in Germany, France, the UK, and elsewhere, and are being supplanted by polarized right- and left-wing groups. The UK now has at least five parties that have some real claim to voters’ allegiances.\n\nIn the U.S. this is masked partially because of the deep-rooted first-past-the-post electoral system which almost guarantees that Democrats or Republicans will win. But the polarization manifest in Europe is present in America not only in electoral results but within the political parties themselves. Of course, there have always been coalitions drawing on disparate interests and ideologies in pursuit of pooled electoral success, but they are now very deeply divided internally, while radical figures such as Tucker Carlson and his ilk fluidly transcend left-right divides.\n\nThe reasons for this are myriad, but one consistent theme is a fervent stress on _identity_.\n\nEverything may be challenged in a struggle to define who we are, personally and collectively.\n\nSimilar stresses roil the international system. China, India, Russia, and much of the Muslim world, especially Iran, now strive to define themselves in terms of their civilizational inheritance, often, as in any deep historical excavation, drawing on powerful religious currents.\n\nThere are similar contested attempts to delineate the key features that have shaped and now define the contemporary “West.”\n\nOne feature frequently emphasized is that the West, while sometimes quite religious, has sought to demarcate specific realms of religious and political authority and thus is “secular,” a word that embraces a wide range of disparate and often contradictory ideas.\n\nIn this context Kevin Flatt’s wide-ranging Secularization_, Social Order, and World History_ is especially welcome and important. It is occasionally marred by dense theoretical prose since the author seeks to combine sociology, history, religious studies, and philosophy, but perhaps this provides necessary nuance for a very wide and complex subject.\n\nRather than treating secularization simply as “less religion,” Flatt portrays it as a complex process that reshapes how communities understand, organize, and govern themselves, and make sense of changing social norms. He seeks to show how secularization has influenced both everyday life and large-scale institutions across different cultures and historical periods.\n\nTo this end, he analyses traditions in China, India, the Islamic world, and beyond, though not Latin America, to illustrate different understandings of “sacred-social order.” He maintains that “the decline of religion” is not some natural and inevitable quasi-Hegelian process but a revolutionary break that has in turn provoked worldwide movements attempting to defend and restore inherited sacred-social orders.\n\nThere are several paths of secularization. In much of the West, it arose with modern states and bureaucracies, but in other regions it has been heavily influenced by colonialism, international trade, and local tradition. The interactions between religion, politics, economics, and social order depend heavily on historical and cultural context. As one example, Flatt outlines how colonial history and local political structures created very different experiences of secularization in West African states.\n\nDrawing on Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, he argues that when religious authority declines, societies necessarily need new ways to maintain social cohesion. This can involve _inter_ _alia_ strengthening legal systems, shaping public education, and developing bureaucratic institutions. However, often these do not make society more stable since secularization creates tensions if the new institutions are not widely accepted. In turn, courts, educational institutions, and bureaucratic systems helped facilitate global trade, which also undercut traditional beliefs and ways of life.\n\nHis criticism of the parallel development of capitalism and market economies as destabilizing traditional societies and their mores is an important analysis. But we should note that this shaking and uprooting of tradition is combined with a concomitant reduction of hunger and poverty, increased life expectancy, and raising the status of women.\n\nWe find the same tensions within the west, including in the U.S. Economic and technological growth and change has undercut local communities, leading to poverty and alienation, while reductive individualism undercuts friendship and the relation between the sexes. This alienation fueled the accession of Donald Trump.\n\nHence, Flatt not only challenges reductionist accounts of secularization that equate religious decline with inevitable progress, he also reviews analyses that emphasize the persistence of religion in modern societies. In outlining these perspectives, he, like Jose Casanova and Peter Berger, provides a nuanced account that neither idealizes secularization nor dismisses its significance.\n\nApart from his global survey, in Chapter 7 he also describes the “Rise of the Secular Order” in the West. In this valuable overview he again shows that this was not inevitable progress but has been shaped by deliberate efforts and campaigns. He offers caution about the limits of his survey, noting that Charles Taylor said of his own 874-page _A Secular Age_ “one could write several books this length and still not do justice” to the topic (176), nevertheless Flatt gives a brief illuminating outline.\n\nHe treats the West as something of an anomaly, with its own secularisms it has often sought to export. He portrays this as a provincial, modern innovation that has developed only over the last 300 years. The historical global norm has been aligning society with a transcendent reality: it is Western secularism that is the exception. The modern Western secular order is not a value-free, neutral absence of religion**.** It is a distinct political project with a specific social grammar.\n\nAt his most critical, he warns: “Secular orders can harbor a deep impulse to attack and dismantle all sacred-social orders, because of their self-conception as natural, neutral, rational, and liberating, in contrast to the qualities they attribute to sacred-social orders.” (239)\n\nHowever, he adds the qualification that “the secular order’s emphasis on human dignity and autonomy can also allow broad scope for the existence and expression of alternative social orders (including sacred-social orders) in microcosm in a given society.” But perhaps we may then question whether living in microcosm is sufficient for many sacred orders.\n\nFlatt’s description of the renewed international assertion of civilizational inheritance powers indicates that their history is a key factor in shaping their interventions in the modern world.\n\nMuch current US foreign policy engagement is with such historic civilization powers.\n\nAmerica is at war with Iran, engaged in proxy conflict with Russia, strategic rivalry with China, attempting to deepen ties with India, and enmeshed in many conflicts in the Islamic world. Perhaps it is time to reconsider Samuel Huntington’s often rejected thesis that conflicts in the modern world will increasingly be shaped by a “clash of civilizations.”\n\nReligion and secularity are crucial in understanding the modern world. If we do not take them seriously, our foreign policy will continue to flounder.",
  "title": "Secularism: Universal to the West, Provincial to Everywhere Else"
}