SECULAR VERSUS ANTI-SECULAR

Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2015) ("My project in this book is to describe a recurrent and, to my mind, disturbing pattern in the history of national liberation. I will discuss a small set of cases: the creation of the three independent states in the years after World War II--India and Israel in 1947-1948 and Algeria in 1962--and I will focus on the secular political movements that achieved statehood and the religious movements that challenged the achievement roughly a quarter century later." Id. at ix.  "I believe that my account, even in its simplest version, provides a useful beginning for a necessary inquiry: What happened to national liberation?" "Initially, at least, this is  success story: the three nations were indeed liberated for foreign rule. At the same time, however, the states that now exist are not the states envisioned by the original leaders and intellectuals of the national liberation movements, and the moral/political culture of these states, their inner life, so to speak, is not at all what their founders expected. One difference is central to my analysis . . .: all three movements were secular, committed, indeed, to an explicitly secular project, and yet in the states they they created a politics rooted in what we can loosely call fundamentalist religion is today very powerful. In three different countries, with three different religions, the timetable was remarkably similar: roughly twenty to thirty years after independence, the secular state was challenged by a militant religious movement. This unexpected outcome is a central feature of the paradox of national liberation." Id. at x-xii. "Readers who doubt that there has ever been a significant secular left in [America] should take a look at our earliest history. The first settlers and the political founders freed themselves or, better, began to free themselves, from the religious establishment of the Old World, and they set up what I think is the first secular state in world history. In a brief postscript, I will explain why the paradox that marks the twentieth-century cases is absent in eighteenth-century America. This is an argument for American exceptionalism, which I will make with one important qualification. However exceptional American were in the eighteenth century, we are less exception today." Id. at xiv.).