Massimo Rosati

Postsecular Modernities: A Sociological Reading

Massimo Rosati - Late Director of the Centre for the Study and Documentation of Religions and Political Institutions in Post-Secular Society at University of Rome Tor Vergata (Italy).

'Postsecular' society is becoming a more and more widespread keyword in contemporary debates, within the philosophical as well as the sociological domains. Even if the word is not so new, it has gained a new conceptual relevance and specificity as a consequence of a deep scrutiny of classical theories of secularization. The paper takes for granted debates on theories of secularization, and tries to contribute to the clarification of the still vague notion of postsecular society', so far symptom of weaknesses of theories of secularization, or of a normative need for a fairer recognition of religious traditions in our liberal institutions. Working on Jurgen Habermas and Adam B. Seligman's different but complementary theories of modernity, the paper tries to suggest a four-cells model to typify relationships between religious traditions and modernity, making more specific the constituive elements of the postsecular society.

Keywords: postsecular society, multiple modernities, self-reflexivity religious traditions.

POST-secular society is increasingly becoming the key word of modern discussions within the philosophical as well as sociological space. Even if this word is not so new, it is due to a deep study of the class-

The article was sent to the editor by the author.

I would like to thank Nick Allen, Adam Seligman, Chiara Letizia, and Christina Steckl for their comments and criticism on the first draft of this paper.

The use of theoretical theories of secularization has acquired a new conceptual significance and specificity1. In this paper, I will take this for granted, and I will also take for granted the reasons that allow us to make the transition from a secular paradigm to a post-secular one. Perhaps this premise is contradictory ². However, my goal is to clarify the still vague notion of a post-secular society. Judging by the existing literature, this concept is more than just a sociological tool: it expresses a general intuition - the insufficiency of secularization theories in all their diversity in order to understand the current state of relations between religions and modern societies. Nor are there enough theories of secularization to reflect the political mechanisms involved, as well as the normative mindset associated with the need, from a normative perspective, to find fairer ways to account for religious claims in liberal institutions. My hope, however overly ambitious, is to increase its sociological usefulness by clarifying the meaning of the concept of "post-secular society" ^.3

1. Backford, J.A. (2003) Social Theory and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Ch. 2). I agree with Beckford's nuanced statement that " one of the most important tasks of sociology is to study the changes in the meaning attributed to secularization in different years and places." However, just as secularization, taken in its contextual sense, "can serve social theory well", so the postsecular, as will be argued in this paper, can be useful for social theory. The main premise of this article is the position of Grace Davie, according to which a "qualitative change" in the secularization debate occurred when we finally realized that it was possible to be "both truly modern and truly religious" at the same time (Davie, G. (2007) Sociology of Religion). Religion, p. ix. London: Sage). As will be shown, mindfulness is a key term for my understanding of the post-secular. For a more sophisticated interpretation of the idea of secularization by Weber and Durkheim, see Goldstein, S. W. (2009). "Secularization Patterns in the Old Paradigm", Sociology of Religion 70 (2): 157 - 178; Goldstein, S.W. (2009) "Patterns of Secularization and Religious Rationalization in Emile Durkheim and Max Weber", Implicit Religion 12 (2): 135 - 163.

2. McLennan, G. (2007) "Towards a Postsecular Sociology?", Sociology 41: 857 - 870.

3. Indirectly, I would like to convince James Beckford that "post-secularism has strong sociological roots," as opposed to his current skepticism. See Backford, J. A. (2010). "The Uses of Religion in Public Institutions: The Cases of Prison", in Molendijk, A. L., Beaumont, J. and Jedan, Ch. (eds) Exploring the Postsecular. The Religious, the Political, the Urban, pp. 381 - 401. Leiden: Brill.

I propose to distinguish between two approaches to post - secular issues, albeit not entirely different. The first approach is based on socio - political concepts, while the second approach is based on socio-anthropological ones. In the first approach, religion is postulated as a first-order concept that takes on concrete meanings based on the practices, beliefs, and experiences of actors. ⁴ This may include conventional religions, implicit religions, folk religions, invented religions, and so on. they pose a much greater challenge than individualized and spiritualized religious experience, which is much more in tune with modern Western (religious) individualization, the basic assumptions of Western modernity, forcing us to pay special attention to such new categories as post-secular ⁵. The second approach considers religion in the spirit of Durkheim, that is, as a set of practices and beliefs centered around the concept of the sacred and capable, on the one hand, to generate social stability, and on the other, to express a specific collective identity. In this case, religion can allow "religious" as well as civil and political forms. Given the familiarity of the sociological community with Durkheim's vision of religion, I will allow myself to focus on the first, socio-political approach to the secular in much more detail.

1. Politics and Religion in the post-secular era

In order to clarify the socio-political meaning of postsecular and make it more useful from a sociological point of view, I'm going to briefly compare two very different meta-narratives that lead us to the need to include the concept of postsecular society in our scientific lexicon. The reason I would like to focus on these two narratives, which involve different genealogies and assessments of Western modernity, is that I hope to draw from them two key dimensions of the concept of post-secular society

4. Backford, J. A. (2003) Social Theory and Religion, p. 21.

5. Rosati, M. (2009) Ritual and the Sacred. A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Politics, Religion and the Self. Farnham: Ashgate.

(1.1). If we then put these two dimensions on the Cartesian axis, we can see four different ways in which Western modernity can interact with religion. In fact, only one of them deserves to be called a "post-secular society", while the others represent different types of relations between religions and modernity (1.2). This four-part model can serve as a tool for positioning and classifying relations between religions and modernity in a wide variety of contexts. Needless to say, this model needs contextual and empirical verification. I cannot go into the context in detail in this article, but I will note the following: these sketches are considered by me as abstract and theoretical reflections designed to provide a theoretical framework for subsequent research of modern Turkey,which can be considered a laboratory for creating a post-secular society. ⁶

1.1. Narratives of (Western) modernity and two dimensions of post-secular society

The first dimension of post-secular society can be derived from the narrative proposed by Habermas. It is well known that Habermas defines modernity as an "unfinished project", the philosophical basis of which is the development of communicative rationality that can balance, to use sociological jargon, the instrumentality of political and economic subsystems.⁷ In addition, it is well known that Habermas ' confidence in the full completion of the Enlightenment project depends on a discursive interpretation of democracy and the law. According to Habermas, modernity, democracy, and the rule of law share a common cognitive trait that marks a kind of evolutionary development from a traditional society to a modern one. This trait is self - reflexivity. "Stavki sovremenno-

6. Rosati M. Turkish Laboratory: Local modernity and Post-secular in Turkey / / Gosudarstvo, religiya, tserkva v Rossii i za rubezhom [State, Religion, Church in Russia and abroad]. 2012. N 1. pp. 111-137.

7. Habermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT; Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon.

From Habermas ' point of view," sti ⁸ " is associated with an increasing self-reflexivity, with a dialogical ability to discuss theses that claim significance, which is perceived as the only source of legitimization of both speech acts that people exchange in public space and institutions operating in the same space. Democracy and the law, understood discursively, turn out to be the political and legal positivization of self-reflexive discursive rationality.⁹

Habermas ' approach to religions in modern times - a deep gap between the "Theory of Communicative Action" and subsequent works - is characterized by the same belief in the cognitive development of modern forms of life, both secular and religious. However, this is not quite the right context for analyzing Habermas ' growing interest in religions as key social and political phenomena, as well as his changing attitude and theoretical understanding of them over the years.¹⁰ In this article, I am only interested in showing how, from the Habermasian perspective, self-reflexivity should be positioned as a cognitive evolutionary element inherent in modernity "at its best", as well as the extent to which it is able to meet the requirements of post-secular modernity.

Fascinated by the work of Eisenstadt, Bella, and others on axial time and modernity as a special form of civilization11, Habermas defends the thesis of the potentially universal nature of modernity, whose Western roots, as well as its cultural particularism, in no way invalidate its cognitive universalism^. As a civilization, modernity, from Habermas ' point of view, is a cognitive environment common to every culture and society

8. The concept is taken from the title of the work of A. Seligman: Seligman, A.V. (2000) Modernity's Wager. Authority, the Self and Transcendence. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

9. Habermas, J. (1996) Between Facts and Norms. Contributions to a Discoursive Theory of Law and Democracy. Oxford: Polity Press.

10. Rosati, M. (2003) "The Making and Representing of Society", Journal of Classical Sociology 3: 29.

11. Arnason, J. P., Eisenstadt, S.N. and Wittrock, B. (eds) (2005) Axial Civilizations and World History. Leiden, Boston: Brill.

and life forms ¹². This means that today there is no form of life that can easily avoid the need to deal with modernity and its cognitive structures, and this, in turn, protects modernity from the need to enter into a dialogical process that will lead to a progressive, even partial, linguistic relativization of its claims to power. To live in a modern and shared civilization means for both secular and religious people an almost compulsory mutual involvement in the self-reflexive study of our life form, as well as in the mutually complementary learning process from other points of view. Accordingly, the first meaning of the idea of a post-secular society can be described as follows: "post-secular society" means not only the fact that religion is established in an increasingly secular environment, but society will have to reckon with the continued existence of religious communities. The term "post-secular" also expresses not only public recognition of religious communities for the functional contribution they make to the reproduction of desirable motives and attitudes for society. Rather, the public consciousness of a post-secular society reflects a normative understanding that has implications for the political interaction of non-believers with believers. In a post-secular society, it is recognized that the "modernization of public consciousness" in the transition to a new phase embraces and reflexively changes both religious and secular mentalities. Both sides, if they both understand the secularization of society as a mutually complementary learning process, can already take their contribution to controversial, publicly discussed topics seriously for cognitive reasons.¹³

This is quite a "normal" expectation from both the Enlightenment tradition and religious doctrines: they are able to implement

12. Habermas, J. (2009) "La rinascita della religione: una sfida per l'autocomprensione laica della modernita?", in Ferrara, A. (ed.) Religione e politico nella societa postsecolare, pp. 24 - 41. Roma: Meltemi; Eisenstadt, S.N. (2003) Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. 2 Vol. Leiden: Brill.

13. Habermas Yu. Between naturalism and religion. Philosophical articles / Translated from German by M. B. Skuratov, Moscow: Vse Mir Publishing House, 2011, p. 106.

This is what self-reflexivity actually means), as well as participate in a mutually complementary learning process from other traditions and points of view. Once again, we should pay attention to the following: Habermas does not mean a certain altruistic or benevolent attitude of civilized people, but the very structural prerequisites of any social interaction in the context of the special, but at the same time universal civilization that modernity constitutes today. Naturally, there is every reason to suspect that "functional" and sociological reasons - for example, the deprivation of traditional religions and the crisis, if not complete failure, of "orthodox" secularization theories - play a role in strengthening and/or making more urgent the process of mutually complementary learning. However, in my opinion, for Habermas, post-secular society is "simply" a flourishing of the internal cognitive structures of modernity.

There are a number of points in Habermas ' position that deserve separate consideration. These points have already been the subject of political and philosophical discussions: for example, his idea of the self-sufficiency of the" political "(in Rawls 'sense) basis of the liberal state in terms of its need for legitimation; ¹⁴ his warning against the "widespread misunderstanding" of the idea of constitutional patriotism as a simple abstract concept independent of the "politics of memory". his idea of an asymmetric burden "in the epistemological claims" of religious and secular citizens, which must somehow be compensated for in the name of the modern ideal of equality.¹⁵

14. Habermas, J. (2006) "The Secular Liberal State and Religion", in Vries, H. de and Sullivan, L. E. (eds) Political Theologies. Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, p. 253. Fordham University Press.

15. Habermas Yu. Between naturalism and Religion, pp. 98-100. Habermas ' idea of post-secularism has been criticized "from outside" the Habermas camp, primarily for being ethnocentric (Leezenberg, M. (2010)" How Ethnocentric is the Concept of the Postsecular?", in Exploring the Postsecular, pp. 91 - 112). It has also been criticized for being too rationalistic (Martin, B. (2010) "Contrasting Modernities: Postsecular Europe and Enspirited Latin America", in Exploring the Postsecular, pp. 63-89). MacLennan finds Habermas ' premise unconvincing, according to which "(a) the majority of citizens in liberal states are secularists; (b) they are conscious supporters of secularism; (c) secularism simply means disbelief" (Leezenberg, M. (2010) " How Ethnocentric is the Concept of the Postsecu-

Fortunately, Habermas ' interpreters are always numerous and well-versed in philosophical argumentation, so it is always possible to refer to their work. I will limit myself to emphasizing one last point. "Post-secular society", according to Habermas 'narrative of modernity, means that" religious consciousness is forced into processes of adjustment", so that, starting from its character as an "all-encompassing doctrine", it is increasingly forced to dilute itself. ¹⁶ At the same time, secular citizens " to the extent that they act as citizens of the state, can in principle neither deny religious images of the world their true potential, nor challenge the right of religious fellow citizens to contribute to public discussions in a religious language."¹⁷. Self-reflexivity and the accompanying process of mutually complementary learning are the mature fruit of the project of modernity as a civilization.

The second dimension of the idea of a post-secular society can be successfully derived from the narrative of Western modernity proposed by Adam Seligman. This is a completely different narrative. Seligman also sees modernity as a civilization, but he does it very differently from Habermas. If from the point of view of

lar?", p. 42). Martin points out that Habermas 'communicative game should be played out according to the rules of the Enlightenment (self-criticism), and that is why "Habermas' criterion of reflexive detachment seems naive, both politically and sociologically, since it requires religious citizens, many of whom were not previously formed by the European Enlightenment, to behave as they should." as if it were not so" (Ibid., 73). Liesenberg deconstructs the idea of Habermas 'post-secularism, pointing out its ethnocentric aspects, its linear vision of progress, and finally concludes that the post-secular, at least in his, Habermas' interpretation, turns out to be an "ideological representation". Some of these arguments, in my opinion, are quite convincing. It is true that Habermas sometimes suggests a strong secularist and rationalist bias in his work, if one does not take into account his good intentions and broad views. However, it seems to me that they are not connected by a logical chain with his idea of the post-secular. These are the prejudices of Habermas himself, not the flaws in the concept of a post-secular society. In addition, I very much hope that Seligman's position will help correct and balance Habermas ' preconceived ideas about religion, in particular because it does not require religions to give up their language and their characteristics, but instead encourages self-reflexive expression of them from within. Habermas ' idea that religious beliefs should be translated into the language of the public mind is a kind of throwback to the hermeneutical model of the Enlightenment.

___

16. Habermas Yu. Between naturalism and religion. p. 107.

17. Ibid., p. 108.

While Habermann sees modernity as a general environment that, thanks to its cognitive evolution, encompasses almost all forms of life, Seligman understands modernity as a special set of social forces, institutional mechanisms, and cultural values that flow from a very specific history. In the spirit of Eisenstadt's comparative sociology, Seligman shows in a number of important works that Western modernity cannot be understood independently of its Christian origins: epistemologically, as well as axiologically, it is a post-Protestant formation.¹⁸ For all its inconsistency, this is by no means an unusual point of view.¹⁹ If we try to summarize Seligman's arguments, then Western modernity is the fruit of the processes of spiritualization, deritualization and individualization of religions that emerged before the axial time, as well as Judaism. These processes culminate in the formation of a secular public political space, as well as the liberal idea of "I". Modernity does not mean the erasure of the sacred from the modern horizon, but its radical immanentization, so that power, far from being heteronomous, now becomes a "purely" transcendental force.

Modern culture and politics... We have done our best to construct an authoritative locus of sacredness based on transcendental rather than transcendental postulates. We reject any idea of a revealed truth about a transcendent being in favor of "self-evident" truths that are as subject to reason as the principles of Euclidean geometry... We rely on the sacredness of our beliefs in individual rights, which are rooted in reason and serve as the "touchstone of our morality", partaking of "transcendental morality". The appeal to reason as something sacred is the foundation of modern democratic and liberal ideas of citizenship, political order,and the identity of modern citizens. ²⁰

18. Seligman, A. B. (2000) Modernity's Wager. Authority, the Self and Transcendence. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Seligman, A. B. (1994) Innerwordly Individualism. New Brunswick: Transaction.

19. For a sympathetic account of Seligman's narrative, see Rosati, M. (2009) Ritual and the Sacred. A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Politics, Religion and the Self. Farnham: Ashgate.

20. Seligman, A. B. (2000) Modernity's Wager. Authority, the Self and Transcendence, pp. 12 - 13.

Such a process implies a serious transformation of the ways of forming the boundaries of collective identity. Instead of rituals as the main symbolic reference points, it is now individual beliefs - rational and compatible with the universal transcendental moral law-that are called upon to define the boundaries of an inclusive moral community that is virtually devoid of fields and distinctions.

The consequences of these processes, triggered by the transformation of worldviews (in the spirit of Weber's processes of disenchantment and rationalization) and linked to materialistic elements (Weber's interweaving of interests and ideas), are diverse. From a sociological point of view, the main consequence is the disappearance of collective (primarily religious) identities and /or their trivialization within the framework of consumerism. From a socio-political point of view, the result is a new reactive and non-reflexive "primordialization" of those identities that do not share this post-Protestant attitude.

Thus, the problem at the empirical level is quite obvious. If the only source of tolerance is the secular liberal political and social order, then we are all facing difficult times as secularism recedes and liberal assumptions about the self and society are widely criticized.²¹

Finally, if it is not at all self - reflective to take the modern post-Protestant understanding of religions for granted, then this leads to a reductionist view of religions as a set of beliefs or doctrines (unfortunately, this naive approach is still very common among educated, liberal-minded researchers). It ignores organized practices aimed at the sacred (in fact, it is the opposite of Durkheim's understanding of religion), and the result is an underestimation of the central place of rituals in religious - and in general social-life-

21. Ibid., p. 130.

neither ²². This mistake was also made by Habermas ²³ until recently.

However, it is here that Seligman's narrative deviates from similar narratives that are critical of modernity. And this is where it converges-at least potentially-with anthropologically more sensitive approaches to religions. In addition, this is also where Seligman takes a rather unexpected turn. Fully aware of the fact that "if the only source of tolerance is the secular liberal political and social order, then we are all facing difficult times," Seligman does not focus on the self-reflexivity of Western modernity, but, on the contrary, turns to the self-reflexivity of religious traditions. He agrees, though not without irony,that liberalism is the best that modernity has to offer. But at the same time, he also calls on religious traditions to take seriously their own internal vocabulary, their belonging to a pluralistic environment, cultural, social and political, and from within to identify their own ways of learning how to "live together". Instead of trying to make liberal tolerance attractive to religious traditions, it directs its efforts, first, to recognize religious differences as visible and practiced by individuals and groups, and secondly, to develop "principled tolerance" capable of recognizing the internal and external "other" based on non-liberal, non-religious principles. but it is precisely religious principles.

The existing liberal mechanisms for smoothing differences through privatization have been overthrown. Often they are replaced by the trivialization of differences or their transformation into a kind of political "privilege"; in such an instrumentalized form, they are again reduced to a common knowledge shared by all.-

22. Seligman, A. B. et al. (2008) Ritual and Its Consequences. An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

23. Similar reflections on the importance of rituals can be found in a conversation between Jurgen Habermas and Eduardo Mendieta about a Postsecular World Society? On the Philosophical Significance of Postsecular Consciousness and the Multicultural World Society. An interview with Jiirgen Habermas by Eduardo Mendieta, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/02/03/a-postsecular-world-society/, доступ от 16.02.2014).

the recipient of interest. Thus, they are again crossed out. The alternative solution I propose is a solution that is based on their recognition. For this recognition to take place, the distinctions themselves must be approved and accepted. He or she, the bearer of the recognition, must do so from his or her own separateness, and not from some supposed latent or neatly disguised universal position. One of the few ways to achieve this is to adopt a position of humility and modesty - not weakness, not passivity (on the basis of weakness and passivity, it is impossible to be tolerant). This approach is largely expressed in the Islamic idea of hilm'ah, in the Jewish concept of anwa, as well as in the judicial prohibition on the use of force to achieve the truth.²⁴

Seligman's project, which aims to describe the above-mentioned "phenomenology of religious tolerance" and to foster tolerance practices consistent with this approach, ²⁵ is by no means the only alternative to the liberal approach. At the same time, Seligman's path can be called one of the most interesting and important.

In this article, I will limit myself to simply borrowing Seligman's second dimension, which defines the very idea of a post-secular society. If, following Habermas, the self-reflexive level of modernity as a general environment and cognitive structure should be considered as the first dimension of post-secular society, appropriate for each axial civilization, then, following Seligman, the level of religious self-reflexivity - that is, the ability to articulate internal sources of meaningful tolerance-should be considered the second dimension of post-secular society.

1.2. How to make the postsecular sociologically useful: a "four-part" model

The essence of my position is that the self-reflexivity of modernity, on the one hand, and the self-reflexivity of reli --

24. Seligman, A. B. (2004) Modest Claims. Dialogues and Essays on Tolerance and Tradition, p. 172. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.

25. Cm. http://www.issrpl.org/programs/2009.html [accessed on 16.02.2014].

gii, on the other hand, are two defining dimensions of the idea of a post-secular society (at least from a socio-political point of view). However, this is only part of the story. In fact, we can talk not only about two defining dimensions of the idea of a post-secular society, but also about two constitutive dimensions and even the conditions of social practices rooted in the post-secular. Roughly speaking, we can assume that a high level of self-reflexivity - both of modernity and of religions themselves-will trigger a process of mutually complementary learning between secular and religious forms of life, which, in turn, will creatively give life to hybrid social practices, redefine the boundaries between these two dimensions, and start "negotiations" about identities, roles, and spaces etc. Post-secular forms of life depend on post-secular social practices, which, in turn, depend on the levels of self-reflexivity of modernity and religions.

The general idea I want to express is as follows (Table 1):

Let's start with square A. Here, the self-reflexivity of modernity in relation to religions is low. To some extent, self-reflexivity has always been inherent in the Enlightenment project, as well as in any other axial civilization. In fact, Western modernity understands itself as the highest and most institutionalized form of reflexivity. However

In fact, Western modernity has often demonstrated excessive dogmatism. As for religions, square A refers to theories of secularization at the initial stage of their development, when it was expected that traditional religions would sooner or later have to disappear from the modern horizon, and science would replace them as a new faith. Today, the so-called "new atheists" seem intent on taking us back to Comte's time. This phase is characterized by a very low level of religious self-reflexivity: religions feel themselves at war with the main cultural and socio-political features of our time. This is a confrontational approach on both sides - mutual non-recognition.

It may seem that this situation is typical only for early modernity, and therefore I would like to note that in this case I do not propose any "evolutionary" model. On the contrary, each square may contain features of all other squares. In other words, mutual non-recognition (for example, characteristic of post-revolutionary France) can now be observed in some social segments, both in the West and elsewhere. For example, in Italy, the discussion of Laicism hardly corresponds to the spirit of "post-secularism", since the parties perceive their conflict as a conflict between" Laicists " and fanatics of the Roman See. In the United States, as well as in the United Kingdom, the confrontation between new atheists and evangelical neo-fundamentalists can be cited as an example.²⁶ As Michael Ian Borer has shown, such modern interpreters and various religious literalists and integralists are united by an obsession with authenticity, a "Cartesian anxiety" that hardly contributes to reflexivity as far as their epistemology is concerned. ²⁷ In this case, in principle, no mutual learning process is possible.

Square B offers us a different picture. Here we have a low level of self-reflexivity of modernity and a relatively high level of self-reflexivity of religions. I would call this situation "authoritarian modernity", because here in religious movements there are more democratic elements.-

26. Amarasingam, A. (ed.) (2010) Religion and the New Atheism. Leiden-Boston: Brill.

27. Borer, M. I. (2010) "The New Atheism and the Secularization Thesis", in Religion and the New Atheism, pp. 125 - 137. Leiden-Boston: Brill.

social trends concerning society as a whole. In this case, the Polish "Solidarity" can be called a classic example. By claiming religious freedom, social movements are paving the way for broader legal demands. By claiming religious rights, they do not simply defend the rights of Catholicism, Islam, or any other tradition, but consciously adopt the language of human rights, contrasting it with authoritarian, though quite modern, regimes. The acceptance of the human rights discourse by religious movements shows that they are able to enter the public space, defend their rights and become actors within this space, on the one hand, without giving up their symbols and identification marks, and on the other, without segregating themselves into"zones of freedom" ²⁸ that are separate from the outside world modern society. In this context, religions can be described as peripheries trying to penetrate a hostile center. As for square A, they are not always the periphery of the social system.

In square D, we are dealing with the exact opposite situation, namely, with a relatively high level of modern self-reflexivity, combined with a low level of religious self-reflexivity. I would call such a situation a paternalistic suppression of religion, when a religious monopoly forces secular actors to build strategic relationships with at least the main religious tradition. In this case, instead of confrontation, secular forces are trying to instrumentalize the main religious tradition based on functional considerations. This is neither an a priori rejection of religion, nor its sincere acceptance, but rather the use of its resources (integration, identity-related, etc.). On the one hand, religion is considered not as a religion, but precisely as another functional resource. On the other hand, religious self-reflexivity is very low, so religious actors fluctuate between a radical rejection of all contact with the secular world and a desire to be used in exchange for public recognition. This situation is complicated-

28. Roy, O. (1994) The Failure of Political Islam, p. 80. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

In the early 1990s (and again later), when, after the fall of the First Republic, the Catholic Church assumed the role of the main defender of national unity in the face of a serious crisis of legitimation of the political system, as well as in the face of an attack on the state by organized criminal groups. In this case, religion appeared as a cultural and political subject, but its activity can be understood both as a "periphery" that comes to the aid of the "center" in trouble, and as such a powerful periphery that the center is forced to attract and use it to maintain control over society.

And now we turn to the consideration of the square C, which just denotes the post-secular situation. This square is in some ways the opposite of square A. It is increasingly being said that our societies are becoming more and more post-secular. Perhaps this is true, and I personally believe that the term "post-secular society" is appropriate and useful. However, my four-part model shows that having a post-secular society is associated with meeting certain requirements. First, such a society presupposes the existence of quite self-reflective and modern social, cultural and political subsystems, and secondly, an equally self-reflective religious landscape. Without fulfilling these conditions, it is impossible to start a fruitful process of mutually complementary learning. Such a society should be, to use Grace Davey's words, "both truly modern and truly religious."²⁹ It is not necessary to mention that these conditions contradict the "orthodox" theories of secularization. At the same time, the co-presence of self-reflexive people within the public space.both modern structures (in the sense of differentiated subsystems and the default shared "immanent framework" ³⁰) and self-reflexive religious actors mean that the idea of a post-secular society is only very indirectly related to the idea of a desecularized society.

29. Davie, G. (2007) Sociology of Religion, p. ix. London: Sage.

30. Taylor, Ch. (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

companies ³¹. If things were different, the notion of a post-secular society would be useless as an analytical tool for analyzing societies that have never been fully secularized or in which religions have always been public (in the sense that Jose Casanova uses this concept), for example, the societies of Italy and Spain.³²

If we put the same thing more analytically, then the postsecondary requires the following:

(1) reflexivity, historicity, and capacity for action, i.e., the three traits inherent in an axial civilization^.;

(2) co-existence of secular and religious worldviews;

(3) deprived religious movements that require public recognition as communities organized on the basis of faith and particularistic beliefs and practices;

(4) vibrant religious pluralism (which draws not only new religious movements into its rhythm, but also traditional religions), which forces religious movements to strengthen their own self-reflexivity and prevent the formation of strong monopolies;

(5) secular groups and individual citizens who, if we return to Habermas, "can neither deny the truth potential of religious images of the world, nor challenge the right of religious fellow citizens to contribute to public discussions in a religious language." ³⁴;

(6) the presence of an "axial vision" as an expression of the sacred; the sacred cannot be expressed only by civil symbols (flag, constitution, political religions, etc.), and, moreover, it cannot take exclusively immanent forms.

If these conditions are sufficiently met, then fundamentally new post-secular social practices can give rise to hybrid forms of life-as on social media.-

31. Berger, P. (ed.) (1999) Th^e Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Washington: Eerdmans Publishing.

32. Thiebaut, C. (2010) "Secularizing Traditional Catholicism: Laicims and laicite", Philosophy and Social Criticism 36 (3 - 4): 365 - 380 (special issue on Postsecularism and Multicultural Jurisdictions).

33. Wittrock, B. (2005) "The Meaning of the Axial Age", in Arnason, J. P., Eisenstadt, S. N. and Wittrock, B. (eds) Axial Civilizations and World History, pp. 51 - 85. Leiden: Brill.

34. Habermas Yu. Between naturalism and religion, p. 108.

both at the national and political levels. At the social level, post-secular practices could develop new relationships between gender and roles, new understandings of public and private, new codes of "decent" behavior, etc.; at the political and constitutional levels, they could generate new institutional arrangements that are more or less different from liberal ones. This is by definition an open process that is contextually determined, so it is simply impossible to describe or anticipate it in detail. Only one thing can be predicted: this process will work to multiply the forms that will be adopted by the present. Post-secular social practices will result not just in diverse modernities, but in alternative forms of modernity or, to use the words of Nilufer Gele, "local modernities." ³⁵ Moreover, the formation of a post-secular society will require a major reconfiguration of the relations between the center and the periphery, the pluralization of centers in their complex relationship to each other, as well as to multiple peripheries.

When I mentioned transformative post-secular social practices, I was referring to two different kinds of social practices. Both of these practices are already well established in a number of contexts. On the one hand, these are all kinds of everyday meetings of people with secular and religious worldviews (meetings that are almost not ritualized in any way: in coffee shops, public parks, media platforms, etc.); on the other hand, more ritualized events, ceremonies, "liturgies" and meetings of civil society that take place in urban space and have already received the name of the city. "post-secular sanctuaries". My hypothesis is that if everyday post-secular social practices work at the molecular and micro-sociological levels, then rituals performed in "post-secular sanctuaries" work at the macrosociological level, making a significant contribution to changing the symbolic, value system of society and giving shape to the post-secular collective macro-image.

35. Eisenstadt, S.N. (2003) Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. 2 Vol. Leiden: Brill; Gole, N. (2005) Interpenetrations. L'Islam et l'Europe. Paris: Galaade Editions; Taylor, Ch. (2001) "Two Theories of Modernity", in Gaonkar, D.P. (ed.) Alternative Modernities. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

2. Socio-anthropological dimension of the post-secular

Viewed from a socio-political point of view, the post-secular implies an increasing awareness of mutual coexistence on the part of both Western modernity and religious traditions. Viewed from a socio-anthropological point of view, the post-secular implies an awareness of the role of rituals and the sacred as building blocks of social life as such, as the deep grammar of society. ³⁶ In this Durkheimian sense, which I am not prepared to expand here, the idea of the post-secular can correct the paradoxical misunderstanding that is partly due to sociology itself. If the Durkheimian tradition and socio-anthropological perspective, which aligns with the Durkheimian premises, have always emphasized the constitutive nature of rituals and the sacred for each society (including for modern Western societies - in secular as well as religious spheres, regardless of the transformations of specific religious traditions that took place in Western modernity), then sociologists and political philosophers create a self-understanding of Western modernity that leaves no room for the ritual and sacred (unless, of course, marginal enclaves are meant). The idea of the post-secular implies ideas that are present in Durkheim's work "Elementary Forms of Religious Life", the essence of which is the need to recognize the fact that each society needs special practices and special places ("post-secular sanctuaries" is a good expression used in modern scientific literature³⁷), which could reproduce the fundamental system of values of society (which, according to Schils, is involved in the nature of the sacred ³⁸). In other words, it implies a certain cultural social morphology, grammar of sacred spaces, as well as those social processes that construct them-

36. Rosati, M. (2009) Ritual and the Sacred. A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Politics, Religion and the Self.

37. Greve, A. (2011) Sanctuaries of the City. Lessons from Tokyo. Farnham: Ashgate.

38. Shils, E. (1974) Center and Periphery. Essays in Macrosociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

shared memory and shared symbols. The analysis of the grammar of sacred spaces can be quite fruitfully combined with the spatial methodology applied to the study of religions by Kim Noth ³⁹.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned four-part model, as well as the socio-anthropological understanding of the post-secular, is intentionally presented here in the most general form. This abstractness of presentation was intentional, and it in no way claims to be self-sufficient. The four-part model should demonstrate its usefulness as a general matrix for considering different societies within a particular square (i.e., some ideal types), which will allow for a better analysis of the relationship between modernity and religion. A socio-anthropological view of the post-secular (with its correlative methodology of "post-secular sanctuaries") should be tested in different contexts.

Translated from English by Dmitry Uzlaner

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