Since the events of September 11, 2001, against the backdrop of two decades of the ascendance of global religious politics, urgent calls for the reinstatement of secularism have reached a crescendo that cannot be ignored. The most obvious target of these strident calls is Islam, particularly those practices and discourses within Islam that are suspected of fostering fundamentalism and militancy. It has become de rigueur for leftists and liberals alike to link the fate of democracy in the Muslim world with the institutionalization of secularism — both as a political doctrine and as a political ethic. This coupling is now broadly echoed within the discourse emanating from the U.S. State Department, particularly in its programmatic efforts to reshape and transform “Islam from within.� In this essay, I will examine both the particular conception of secularism that underlies the current consensus that Islam needs to be reformed — that its secularization is a necessary step in bringing “democracy� to the Muslim world — and the strategic means by which this programmatic vision is being instituted today. Insomuch as secularism is a historically shifting category with a variegated genealogy, my aim is not to secure an authoritative definition of secularism or to trace its historical transformation within the United States or the Muslim world. My goal here is more limited: I want to sketch out the particular understanding of secularism underlying contemporary American discourses on Islam, an understanding that is deeply shaped by U.S. security and foreign policy concerns in the Muslim world.

A number of origin stories can be told about the modern phenomenon of secularism. One that commands considerable weight today is rooted in the doctrine of religious tolerance. In this account, modern secularism emerged in the seventeenth century as a political solution intended to end the European Wars of Religion by establishing a lowest common denominator among the doctrines of conflicting Christian sects and by defining a political ethic altogether independent of religious doctrines.1 The realization of these goals was dependent, of course, upon the centralization of state authority and a concomitant demarcation of society into political, economic, religious, and familial domains whose contours could then be mapped and subjected to the calculus of state rule. In this narrative, both the ethics of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience are considered to be goods internal to the doctrinal separation that secularism institutes between operations of the state and church, between politics and religion. The assumption is that the state, by virtue of its declared neutrality toward specific religious truth claims, makes religious goals indifferent to the exercise of politics and, in doing so, ensures that religion is practiced without coercion, out of individual choice and personal assent.

Insomuch as liberalism is about the regulation of individual and collective liberties, it is the principle of freedom of conscience that makes secularism central to liberal political philosophy in this account. Note, for example, that even though a number of contemporary totalitarian regimes abide by the doctrinal separation of religion and state, they also routinely intervene to restrict people’s ability to practice their faith (for example, China, Syria, or even the former Soviet Union). Such a violation of people’s right to religious freedom contradicts a core commitment at the center of liberal democratic governance. This does not, of course, mean that there is a singular model according to which the principle of religious freedom is instituted, practiced, and regulated in liberal democracies. But it does mean that public debate in liberal societies about how the boundary between religion and the state is to be established and managed is counterbalanced with concerns for maintaining the right to practice one’s religion freely without coercion and state intervention.2 This particular linkage between the doctrinal separation of church and state and the secular principle of freedom of conscience, while foundational to liberal political rule, is also shot through with tensions and generates its own peculiar set of problems. Nonetheless, secularism is upheld these days by American liberals and progressives alike on the assumption that this particular sociopolitical arrangement is the best way to ward off the dangers of religious strife.