Faithful to Secularism

Religion and democracy are not necessarily at loggerheads. Powerful religious actors may coexist with and even consolidate democracy. David T. Buckley proposes a theoretical model of “benevolent secularism” as an advance in categorizing church-state relations in countries lucky enough to manifest “twin tolerations” (pp. 16, xi). The three essentials of the theory are differentiation of church and state institutions, cooperation, and principled distance. The first means that there is genuine separation. The second means that the state in benevolence takes genuine notice of the concerns of its religious citizens. The third means that the state treats its different religious communities even-handedly. Through benevolent secularism states can avoid the “secularism trap” whereby either religious or state elites pursue maximalist demands. Buckley illustrates his theory with case studies of Ireland, Senegal, and the Philippines. He treats each country in time of emergence—respectively, the making of the 1937 constitution, independence from France in 1960, and the Constitutional Convention in 1934. Then, each country has another chapter illustrating how it fared at a critical juncture in its later development; this critical juncture is perhaps a little more arbitrary, even diffuse—respectively, the collapse of Catholic monopoly, the presidency of Abdoulaye Wade (2002-2012), and the reproductive health bill signed into law in 2012. At all three junctures, Buckley argues that benevolent secularism successfully met the challenges. The treatment in each case puts considerable stress on interaction between religious and secular elites (particularly the “pious secularists” and those tending to “anti-clericalism”), as it does on institutions. In each case he also attempts to show that his model provides better explanations than rival theories like modernization, rational choice, and moderation (the latter giving prominence to “religious moderates”). He builds on archival material, public opinion data, and interviews conducted in the summer of 2011 for Ireland, 2010 for Senegal, and 2010 and 2014 for the Philippines.

Constitution · Democracy · Independence (probability theory) · Political science · Politics · Presidency · Secular state · Secularism · Separation of church and state · Sociology · State (computer science) · Law · Religion, Society, and Development