SACW #2 | 16 Nov. 2005 | Dilemmas of secularism in India and America (Part 2)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire #2 | 16 Nov, 2005
Dispatch No. 2174

[Continued below is the final and concluding part of the essay by Meera
Nanda ; Part 1 of the essay was carried in SACW #1 | 16 Nov, 2005]

o o o o

Axess Magazine, issue 8, 2005

Godless States [Part 2]

Dilemmas of secularism in India and America. Parallels between the
Christian right in the US and Hindu nationalists in India show how
crucial it is to defend the Enlightenment idea of the secular state.
While it is important to give faith its due, faith too must give reason
its due. The postmodern deconstruction of science has, ironically, been
very hospitable to reactionary religiosity.

By Meera Nanda
Biologist and Philosopher of Science

[. . .]

In the rest of this essay, I will defend the priority of secularisation
of the civil society over secularism as the operating principle of the
state. The first section will examine how secularism and science were
co-opted into the dominant religious commonsense. The next section will
look at how high levels of popular religiosity provide a fertile soil
for religionisation of politics and politicisation of religions. In the
final section, I will argue for a new Enlightenment that respects the
legitimate rights of conscience and freedom of religion, acknowledges
the place of religion in the public sphere, but denies it any special
claim on morality, knowledge and public policy. Religion can enter the
public sphere provided it answers to the same rules of publicly
accessible evidence and reason that apply to all other participants in
the public sphere.


THE CREATION OF SECULAR STATES marked a break from the state control of
churches in America and from the institution of caste in India. But in
both cases, this revolutionary innovation in politics was not
accompanied by a corresponding revolution in beliefs. Rather, both
witnessed a “village enlightenment” in which Enlightenment ideals of
anti-supernaturalism, empiricism and religious toleration were used to
validate, rather than challenge, the traditional religious beliefs in
the existence of supra-sensory power that lies beyond this world but yet
intervenes in it.14 In both countries, moreover, the votaries of a
sceptical, rationalist tradition who believed that the affairs of human
beings should be governed by a reliance on reason and evidence adduced
from the natural world—the “freethinkers,” to use Susan Jacoby’s
felicitous name for them15 —have remained in a minority. The quiet
assimilation of rationalist/secularist impulse into religious
metaphysics is the key for understanding the paradoxical phenomenon of
secularism without secularisation of beliefs.
Many misconceptions abound regarding the origin of the secular state in
America. Liberal origin-stories describe the American constitution as
the fulfillment of the Enlightenment, while conservatives see its lack
of reference to God as proof that religious faith was so “self-evident,”
and so firmly entrenched in the American society, that it did not
require any imprimatur of government.16 Indians have their own
misconceptions about American-style secularism. There are well-known
Indian social scientists who believe that the American model of
separation of state and society is a “gift of Christianity” and
therefore unsuited for a Hindu India. And then there are notable Hindu
ideologues who argue that only intolerant, superstitious “creeds” like
Christianity and Islam need to be kept out of the affairs of the state,
but not the “innately” tolerant and rational Hinduism.17
Far from being a straight-forward “gift” or a “curse” of Christianity,
there were equally devout Christians on both sides of the debate over
church-state separation in America. A careful reading of US history
reveals a complex alliance of the more numerous devout evangelical
Christians (Baptists and Methodists, mostly) with the handful of
freethinkers (deists and Unitarians, mostly). While the evangelicals
detested the rationalist and deist Christianity of Thomas Jefferson and
condemned Thomas Paine as an atheist, they nevertheless helped to ratify
the constitution which barred a religious test for office holders
(Article 6 of the US constitution) and prohibited the state from any
direct interference and/or promotion of religion (the first amendment of
the bill of rights). They favoured disestablishment in part out of their
theological belief that it was blasphemous for the state to do God’s
work, and partly out of a fear of persecution from a church backed by
state power. (Baptists had good reason to champion the separation of
church and state for they had been persecuted by the Anglican Church
back in England and were not much liked by the puritans who established
the Massachusetts Bay Colony). Whereas Jefferson, Madison, Paine and
other more secularist founders were more concerned with the corrupting
influences of faith on politics, their evangelical supporters were more
worried about the power of the state to regulate their religion. While
Baptists, Methodists and other evangelicals championed the cause of the
American Revolution against the British, and worked hard to ratify the
constitution, they understood the Jeffersonian wall of separation as a
one-way wall, meant to keep out the “wilderness of the state from the
garden of religion.”18
The irony is that the same groups of evangelical “awakeners” who helped
to ratify the secular constitution also turned out to be one of the most
influential and lasting sources of anti-intellectualism in the new
republic. In his 1962 classic, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,
Richard Hofstadter has given a vivid description of how the two “great
awakenings” led by Baptists and Methodists led to an “uprising” against
the designated freethinkers and the tradition of science and learning
that existed in the mainline Protestant churches (which were, at that
time, the patrons of science at Harvard and Yale). The evangelicals
taught a simple religion of the heart: all you needed to be saved was to
be “born again” and to read the Bible. Anyone could do that without
getting bogged down in learned disputations in theology or metaphysics.
This form of Christianity spread widely because it was more conducive to
the anti-authoritarian and anti-aristocratic sensibilities of the
farmers and craftsmen settling the westward frontier. The slave
population in the south responded especially well to the Baptist
revivals as they gave them an opportunity to establish their own
churches, led by their own preachers. The revivals changed the religious
geography of the country: by the end of the eighteenth century, Baptists
and Methodists far outnumbered the puritans and the Anglicans. The trend
has continued into the present era: evangelical churches are growing
more rapidly than the more liberal, mainline denominations.
However, even as they encouraged religious enthusiasms, often aided by
faith-healing and miracles, evangelical preachers proclaimed a great
love for science of their times (that is, the period between the
American Revolution and the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of
Species in 1859). As long as the mechanical philosophy that informed
Newtonian science was not used to propagate scepticism and secularism,
American churches remained enthusiastic in its support. Here they were
following in the long tradition of Protestant scientists (including
Newton and Boyle), who believed that by studying nature they were
revealing God’s laws. What is more, their Protestant belief in the
omnipotence of God led them to oppose the Aristotelian scholasticism
which assigned quasi-divine intelligence to matter. This helped them to
accept a purely naturalistic, mechanical understanding of matter and
forces on religious grounds. Through most of the 18th and 19th
centuries, leading Christian scientists and ministers in America were
able to accept perfectly secular, naturalistic explanations of disease
(small pox), natural disasters (earthquakes), and the creation of the
solar system and the geology of the earth, while interpreting natural
laws as the creation of God. A two-tiered worldview remained the norm,
with laws of nature below, supporting super-natural beliefs above: God
became the creator not of individual objects found in nature, but of the
laws which nature followed on its own. Thus even when a creator God
became irrelevant to the actual practice of science, He was retained as
the ultimate source of nature’s laws.19
This apologetic natural theology suffered serious setbacks through the
so called “golden age” of secular thought (roughly the period after the
Civil War to the end of the First World War). This was the “gilded age”
when America underwent large scale industrialisation and urbanisation.
And it was also when Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species
(1859). Most mainline churches fitted Darwin into their two-storied
theology: they accepted natural selection as the mechanism that God
chose to create the living world. But Darwin had created serious doubts
in the minds of leading intellectuals and scientists about the need for
God as the ultimate creator of natural laws. Highly regarded public
intellectuals like John Dewey, George Santayna, John Herman Randall and
Robert Ingersoll tried to popularise a new conception of knowledge that
substituted the metaphysical absolutes of received traditions with an
empirically adequate, albeit uncertain and forever changing conception
of truth.20
The current upswing of intelligent design and theistic science is a
reaction against the thinning of the supernatural and the fraying of the
two-storied model of accommodating naturalistic science with God. It is
a throwback to the old habit of using science in an apologetic mode. In
the present context, when the religious conservatives are aggressively
seeking political power to enforce their theological views on public
policy, there is a great danger of God entering science classrooms where
He does not belong.
Indian secularism, too, bears the marks of strategic alliances between
secular humanists, and those who derive their view of secularism and
democracy from neo-Hinduism. What makes the Indian case interesting is
how neo-Hindu reformers have borrowed modern ideals of democracy,
secularism and modern science, but claimed—against all known historical
facts—that far superior, “holistic” versions of these modern values had
always existed in the “Golden Age” of Vedic Hinduism, dating back to the
beginning of time itself. For example, the historical fact that original
Vedic Hinduism was a religion of caste hierarchy—the very obverse of
what we today understand by democracy—is countered by neo-Hindus who
insist that the “integral humanism” of the institutions of Varna or
caste is a “deeper” form of democracy that avoids the class warfare and
alienation of the West. The objection that Vedic Hinduism, in fact,
valued mystical intuition over sensory knowledge—the opposite of
empiricism that is the hallmark of modern science—is denied by claiming
mysticism to be a “higher” more “holistic” form of empiricism. Thus,
while neo-Hindu nationalists have happily borrowed liberal-secular ideas
from the West, they have knitted them into the traditional
weltanschauung to create a potent myth of Hinduism’s “innate” democratic
and pluralistic spirit, and its “inherent” rationality. This cultural
habit of strategically laying a priority-claim for “the Vedas” on
whatever is considered prestigious in the West is the key to
understanding both the success of India’s brand of secularism, and the
Hindu chauvinism that it perpetuates.
If a “wall of separation” is the metaphor for the American model of
negative secularism, the “wheel of law” is the metaphor for India’s
positive secularism. The Indian model allows the state to both censor
and promote the many religions of the land, as long as it does not play
favourites. It is neutrality and even-handedness—dharma nirpekshta—and
not indifference to religion that makes India secular. This principle is
literally embossed on the Indian flag in the form of Dharma Chakra, or
the wheel of law, which symbolises the idea of sarva dharma sambhava, or
“equal respect for all religions.” The idea is that just as a wheel
moves because all the spokes are of equal length, the Indian state will
be even-handed and impartial toward different religious faiths.21 Within
this requirement of impartiality, the Indian state is free to rewrite
religious laws of all faiths if their social consequences contradict the
principles of democracy: the institution of caste, which has religious
sanction, for example, was declared unconstitutional at the founding of
the republic. On the “positive” side, the Indian government is allowed
to provide funds—equally, for all religions—for pilgrimages, maintaining
places of worship and running schools and other social-service agencies
operated by “faith-based” organisations.22
The Indian model was a hybrid product of secular humanism and neo-Hindu
revivalism. On the secularist side were democratic socialists like
Jawaharlal Nehru and B R Ambedkar and radical humanists like MN Roy who
believed that a rational reform of the Hindu worldview was a
prerequisite for social progress. The revivalists were inspired by
neo-Hindu ideas of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda, Sri
Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi and others, who believed that a regeneration
of the supposedly tolerant and benevolent Vedic “golden age” was a
prerequisite for social progress.
The Indian version of secularism satisfied the need for social reform
without distancing the state from it and without encouraging a rational
critique of religion through public schools and other cultural agencies.
The Indian constitution gives the state the right to censor those
secular aspects of religious practices that interfered with the
fundamental right of equality of all citizens (especially caste, which
stood in the way of creating a democratic nation state), while
continuing with the old Hindu tradition of the state acting as the
protector and promoter of faith. Any remaining doubts about the
essential Hindu-ness of the new constitution were assuaged by presenting
the principle of “equal respect” as a modern version of ancient Hindu
tolerance for, and belief in, the equal worth of all religions.
The Indian model of secularism has worked, after a fashion. Probably
because secularism was presented as part of a Hindu heritage, Hindu
religious leaders (to their credit) did not resist the constitution’s
disestablishment of the Hindu institution of caste. But the price has
been enormous: the Indian state has happily played vote-bank politics
with religion. For all the pious professions of neutrality, Hinduism has
served as the de facto civil religion of the state, including the well
known cases of Indira Gandhi, Jayalalitha and other political figures
routinely worshipping in temples in their official capacity, and in
turn, getting ritually worshipped in temples as divine incarnations.
Politicians continue to indulge in conspicuous acts of ritualistic
religiosity, and yet retain their “secular” credentials by indulging the
religious rituals and superstitions of all faiths. On the other hand, it
is an undeniable and shameful fact that the state has given in to
conservative Muslim opinion and refrained from intervening in the
retrograde elements of Islamic personal law. This has given a good
excuse to the Hindu right to rage against “pseudo secularism” and to
demand the creation of a Hindu state which will withdraw all
constitutionally granted freedoms for Islam and Christianity by
declaring them “alien political ideologies.”23
The problem with equating secularism with “innate” Hindu “tolerance” is
that in reality Hindus have never treated other religions to be as true
as Hinduism. Instead the predominant Hindu creed has been, to quote
Achin Vanaik, an astute critic of Hindutva, “you have your truth, and I
have mine, but mine is the deepest truth.”24 While Hinduism allows
different levels and approaches to truth, it places the pantheistic God
of Vedanta at the top. While Hindu nationalists continue to make much of
Hindu pluralism, they have lately begun openly to assert the doctrinal
superiority of Hinduism over “Semitic” monotheistic faiths. They want
the Indian state openly to embrace the traditional role of “dharma
rakshak ” (protector of dharma), to promote Hinduism at home and around
the world so that India can fulfill its destiny as the “jagat guru”
(guru to the world).25
If secularism has been subsumed into a romanticised version of
Hinduism’s hierarchical pluralism, modern science—one of the most
important forces for secularization—has been subsumed into the spiritual
metaphysics of the Vedas and Vedanta. It has become an article of faith
among modern Hindu intellectuals that Hinduism is the “universal
religion of the future” because it is “not in conflict with modern
science,” or better still, is “just another name” for modern science.
Indeed, this myth has become one more reason to condemn Islam and
Christianity as faith-based and irrational “creeds” as compared to the
reasoned, evidence-based, “scientific” truths of Hinduism. Whereas the
assimilation of science into a natural theology in America was primarily
motivated by a concern to fight disbelief and scepticism, the
assimilation of science into Hinduism has always had a strong
nationalistic impulse to establish the superiority of Hinduism.
The problem is that the picture of the world that the Hindu apologists
defend as having anticipated and/or been affirmed by modern science has
nothing that any respectable, mainstream scientist would recognise as
scientific at all. What is being affirmed is the idealistic metaphysics
of Vedanta which views the objective world of matter as a by-product, or
an epiphenomenon, of disembodied, immaterial consciousness that Hindus
call “Brahman.” This is a world where natural objects have a
quasi-divine intelligence and purpose embodied in them, and where, in
the words of Deepak Chopra, “human desire or intention is a force in
nature, just as gravity is a force in nature, or electromagnetism is a
force in nature ”26 (Deepak Chopra has amassed a fortune by teaching
that we can literally will our bodies to stay ageless and healthy).
Finding parallels between this supra-natural or paranormal worldview and
quasi-mystical interpretations of modern quantum physics, neo-vitalistic
biology of mavericks like Rupert Sheldrake, holistic theories of Gaia
and other New Age fantasies has become an abiding preoccupation of Hindu
apologists. Unfortunately, the postmodernist vogue of alternative
sciences, the feminist and deep ecologist championing of re-enchantment
of science have played a negative role by giving legitimacy to the
worldview of Vedic sciences.27
To conclude this section, disestablishment in India and the US was not
accompanied with disenchantment thanks, in part, to the assimilation of
science into the religious commonsense of both societies. The
assimilative, “village enlightenments” in both societies have
contributed to the persistence of a super-naturalistic worldview, even
while allowing advanced scientific research to go on unhindered by the
religious establishment. God has been kept in play by turning science
into a prop for Him or it (Vedantic Brahman being an impersonal force).
Because the religious establishment presented itself as the guardian and
champion of science, educated middle classes in America and India,
including scientists, engineers and other professionals, did not develop
a vested interest in combating the super/supra-naturalistic worldview
that science was being absorbed into. The result has been a
compartmentalisation between high science and technology in the labs,
without any significant displacement of unscientific beliefs and
practices in the rest of the society.

HAVING ESTABLISHED that secularism without secularisation is possible, I
now want to demonstrate that it is not sustainable. Contrary to social
theorists who support secularism as a sound constitutional principle but
who are suspicious of any critique of religion as disrespectful of the
common people’s faith, reason and courage,28 I believe that a critical
engagement with the content and logic of religious metaphysics is a
necessary condition for the long-term survival of secular states. As the
experience of the world’s largest and oldest democracies shows,
democratic elections alone, without a concomitant decline in
religiosity, can deliver power to conservative and nationalistic
religious movements. In societies like India and America where
capitalist technological modernisation has not brought about a
corresponding decline of the level and intensity of religiosity, secular
public intellectuals and scientists may have a special responsibility to
argue on behalf of a secular worldview.
The role of religiosity in religious political movements has been
highlighted by Nikki Keddie, the well-known historian of Islam. Why is
it, Keddie asks, that Canada, so close to its southern neighbour
culturally and economically, is relatively free from an aggressive
Christian fundamentalism? And why is China, a non-Christian emerging
economy, not very different from India, relatively free from strong
religo-political movements? She believes that the difference lies in the
levels of popular religiosity:

Significant religious political movements …tend to occur only where in
recent decades (whatever the distant past) religions with supernatural
and theistic contents are believed in, or strongly identified with, by a
large proportion of the population…Either … a high percentage of the
population identifies with the basic tenets of its religious tradition
regarding its god or gods, its scriptural texts and so forth… or/and
there is a widespread quasi-nationalistic identification with one’s
religious community as against other communities. (emphases in the
original)29

The 2004 presidential elections in the US provide strong support for
Keddie’s hypothesis that religiosity, or faith, can act as a political
force in its own right. According to the influential Pew Center’s Trends
2005, neither class, nor ethnicity or denominational affiliation, but
the degree of religiosity decided the voting pattern:

The political fault-lines in the American religious landscape do not run
along denominational lines, but cut across them. That is, they are
defined by religious outlook rather than denominational labels….
Traditionalists, whether evangelicals, mainline or Catholic, are more
likely to be Republicans, while those who are eager to adapt their faith
to modern beliefs or who are secular are more likely to be democratic.
(Emphasis added.)30

All available data show that traditionalist trends have been gaining
ground in American Christianity in recent decades. The more conservative
evangelical churches have been growing at the expense of more liberal
denominations. A higher proportion of believers are beginning to profess
faith in the afterlife, divine judgment, possibility of miracles and the
efficacy of prayer. Not only have traditional religious beliefs grown in
intensity through the 1990s, the faithful also seem to have lost their
earlier inhibitions about keeping faith out of the public sphere. In
1996, a significant majority (54 per cent over 43 per cent) believed
that churches should take a stand on political issues, a complete
reversal of the response for the same question in 1968. The new
alignment in religious landscape of America is that of the religious
intense in all traditional faiths against the secular culture. In that
fight, the more traditionalist believers are only too keen on allowing
the churches to get involved in the affairs of the state.31
The growth in the intensity of traditional beliefs obviously does not
automatically mean a growth in the fundamentalist style of religiosity.
Indeed, more in-depth interviews with believers of varying religiosity
show that most Americans still prefer a “quiet faith,” which shies away
from religious extremism and values toleration and individual freedom in
matters of conscience: even the most devout are not about to establish a
state-supported chruch that enforces Christian piety on all.32 But the
growing intensity of traditional religiosity does suggest a greater
sympathy for conservative social values, including a faith in American
manifest destiny. The Pew Foundation’s Trends 2005 clearly shows that
those who attend church more frequently are significantly more opposed
to gay marriages and stem cell research, two of the hot-button social
issues that George Bush pushed with great deftness in the 2004
presidential campaign.
Observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Samuel Huntington in our own
times have noted, to quote Huntington, “countries and individuals who
are more religious tend to be more nationalistic.”33 The polling data
reported by Trends 2005 confirm a far greater level of support for the
Iraq war and the “war on terror” among the more devout, as compared to
the less committed and liberal Christians. There is a long history of
Americans seeing their country in messianic terms with a sacred mission
to save the world. It is for this reason Americans have by and large
bought into George Bush’s equation of 9/11 terrorists as enemies of
civilisation itself. This self-image of their nation as a redeemer
nation, as literally doing God’s work of spreading the light of liberty
around the world, constitutes one of the deepest ironies of American
history in which the impulse for the good turns into a force for
imperialism and militarism.
India is another country where popular religiosity tends to merge
seamlessly into national pride, both of which are crassly exploited by
the Hindu right to stoke the flames of a blood-and-soil variety of
nationalism. Hindu nationalists literally deify the landmass of “Greater
India” (which includes all of South Asia and parts of Southeast Asia as
well) as the homeland “Vedic Aryans,” to whom the universal and eternal
laws of the cosmos were revealed. This hardcore “Hindu nation” ideology
has appropriated and encouraged public worship of the idols and images
of Bharat Mata (Mother India) in which the geographical contours of
India merge into the body of a traditional Hindu goddess. It is
commonplace in “secular” India—even under the “secular” congress—to see
such starkly Hindu nationalist imagery openly and proudly displayed in
government offices, police stations and even on university campuses. In
public spaces so over-charged with Hindu symbols, the promise of equal
citizenship without regard to creed becomes meaningless.34
Hinduisation of the public sphere is the “operation slow poison,” an
every-day “indoctrination amidst bhajans (hymns), seduction in the midst
of festive processions” to use Meena Kandasamy’s very apt description.35
Bharat Mata is only a recent goddess, whose invention dates back to the
early 20th century anti-colonial nationalism. Hindutva forces have
systematically targeted popular religious festivals celebrating old and
beloved gods like Ganesh, and Ram and the goddess Durga for political
purposes. The agitation that led to the demolition of the mosque in
Ayodhya in 1992 was given the trappings of a religious pilgrimage. The
festival celebrating Ganesh, which used to be a popular but private
affair in Tamil Nadu, for example, has become a massive public
spectacle. The castes and tribes long considered “unclean” and
“uncivilised” are being inducted into public worship of Ganesh, Ram and
other deities and then deployed as foot-soldiers in the periodic riots
that break out against Muslims and Christians.36
The link between religiosity and Hindutva is not limited to idol-worship
and popular festivals. The more elite, “intellectual” Hindus who prefer
gurus with more eclectic mixes of old and new Hindu doctrines were no
less supportive of Hindutva’s cultural agenda, or immune from its
chauvinism. Charismatic gurus including Sat Sai Baba, Amritanandmayi
(Amma), Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, to say nothing of numerous tele-yogis, all
lent their full support to the Hindu nationalist agenda when they were
in power.37
It is an article of faith among progressive intellectuals in India to
defend the religious beliefs of ordinary people (good) while condemning
the religious nationalist expressions of the faith (bad). To question
the content of the myths and the metaphysics that underpin popular
religiosity is considered to be in bad taste, a sign of the “colonial
mind” of the critic. Rationalists are exhorted to counter “bad Hindutva”
with “good Hinduism,” as if popular Hindu beliefs and practices have
nothing to do with Hindu nationalism.
But it is not so clear at all that popular religiosity itself is so
politically innocent. For all their differences, the psychological and
behavioral manifestations of Hinduism and Hindutva are nearly identical.
Yes, of course, Hindutva is not a religious movement, for it is not in
the business of salvation of souls, or in the business of spreading
god-awareness. It is in the business of acquiring power in order to
bring its version of militant Hinduism as a blue-print for state
policies. But to an average Hindu, the religious iconography, allegories
and millenarianism (Ram Rajya) that Hindu nationalists use in their
political mobilisations appear indistinguishable from the real thing.
Conversely, the scriptural beliefs and myths of popular Hinduism make
the Hindutva ideology to appear plausible, noble and worthy of defense
to a vast majority of Hindus. This does not mean that ordinary believers
are full of nationalistic passions, or that they can only be aroused to
political action on religious grounds. All it means is that traditional
religiosity of the voters remains a potential resource that political
parties can freely mobilise for electoral gains.


WHAT IS TO BE DONE? It is easy for secularists to despair, as in America
these days, or to celebrate too soon, as in India where the Hindu right
lost the last election. There is also the temptation to mobilise a
“religious left” that can invoke sacred books for social justice, peace
and the environment. The idea is to use “good” religion to wean people
away from “bad” religion, invoke the “real” faith to challenge those who
would turn it into an “ideology” for war and hatred.
There is no doubt at all that the secularists need to get religion
right, but that does not mean that they must get religion. It is time
for all thinking people to take religion seriously, not as false
consciousness, not as a left-over superstition from the past, but as a
necessary dimension of human life which answers a nearly universal need
for finding transcendent purpose in life and death. This need for
meaning that can dignify existential struggles of everyday life, and
overcome the fear of death, is integral to human existence. Secularists
must learn to respect this need for sacred meaning, and not rush to
condemn every expression of religiosity as a sign of backwardness or
superstition.
But while it is important to give faith its due, faith, too, must give
reason its due. A secular society must respect religion, but only within
the limits of reason. The reach of reason must extend to all empirical
claims that derive from faith in the super-natural/spiritual entities
and the sacred teachings derived from them, everywhere, whether in the
public or in the private sphere, in the labs but also in the temples and
churches. A wall of separation between reason and faith must go up in
the minds of citizens first, in order for the wall of separation to work
in society.
In practical terms, this means a revival of the forgotten
rationalist-sceptical elements of the secularist project represented by
Jefferson, Paine and the later pragmatist-secularists in America and by
Nehru, Ambedkar and Roy in India. Their secularist project was not just
a matter of laws and rules, but a matter of intellectual conviction. It
was born of an inquiring attitude toward religion, aware of the great
harm dogmatism in the name of God or the “eternal truths” of dharma has
caused through history through the wars of conquest and colonialism or
through the passive-aggressive violence of caste institutions.
Secularism as a worldview does not mean rejecting all sense of the
sacred that transcends the profane world of here-and-now. But it does
mean divesting the sacred of the right to make existence claims about
entities which supposedly act in nature—soul, spiritual “energy,”
reincarnation, miracles, to name a few. Or to put it more precisely,
secularism means reserving the right to demand the same level of
evidentiary support we demand for other empirical beliefs for religious
propositions which claim to represent some entities or processes in the
actual world. As long as the God of religions is supposed to be present
in the world of space and time accessible to ordinary human senses,
He/She/It has to be able to stand up to the same level of scrutiny as
any other claim about empirical phenomena like chairs, or DNA, or atoms.
The defense of secularism in our times must start with a defense of
scientific reason itself. In recent times, modern science has come in
for harsh and unwarranted criticism from the postmodern left for serving
the ends of colonial and patriarchal powers that oppress marginalised
social groups. Modern science, according to its “radical” critics, is a
social construct that makes the dominant interpretations of nature
appear as if they were facts of nature. This radical scepticism toward
the content of modern science has resulted in calls for “alternative
sciences” which will produce a benign and socially progressive picture
of nature from the standpoint of the non-dominant social groups. This
enterprise of social construction of alternative accounts of nature has
been a terrible diversion from the task of confronting the growing
forces of reactionary religiosity. What is worse, this postmodernist
deconstruction of science is very hospitable to the defenders of
intelligent design in America who have been using very similar arguments
to condemn naturalism of Darwinian evolution as a social construct of
secular elites. And as I have been arguing, the spread of postmodernist,
anti-Enlightenment ideas in India have left Indian critics of Hindu
nationalists with no tools to counter the Hindu nationalist propaganda
for “Vedic sciences.”38
In conclusion, the future of secular societies depends upon the
cultivation of secular culture. Scientists and freethinkers have no
choice but to get more deeply engaged with the religious commonsense of
our times. End

MEERA NANDA
Biologist and Philosopher of Science



Footnotes:
1. Conor Cruise O’Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and
Nationalism. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988).

2. For fundamentalism as religious maximalism, see Bruce Lincoln, Holy
Terrors: Thinking About Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003). For fundamentalism as strong religion, see
Gabriel Almond, R. Scott Appleby and Emmanuel Sivan, Strong Religion:
The Rise of Fundamentalism around the World. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003). For religionization of politics, see Mark
Jurgensmeyer, The New Cold War?: Religious Nationalism confronts the
Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

3. On the 2004 US elections, see Barna Organization, “Born-again
Christians were a significant factor in President Bush’s re-election”
http://www.brana.org. See also, “Evangelicals say they led charge for
the GOP,” Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2004. Deborah Cladwell, “Did God
intervene?: Evangelicals are crediting God with securing the re-election
of George W. Bush,” http:///www.Beliefnet.com. On the influence of
religious right on the Bush administration, Chris Mooney, “W.’s
Christian Nation,” The American Prospect, Vol. 14, no. 6, June 1, 2003;
Karen Tumulty and Matthew Copper, “What does Bush owe the Religious
Right? Time, Feb 7, 2005. On the influence of religious right on Bush’s
science policy, see Esther Kaplan, With God on Their Side: How Christian
Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy and Democracy in George Bush’s
White House. (New York, Free Press, 2004).

4. For an annotated transcript of Bush’s inaugural speech, see Deborah
Caldwell, “Decoding Bush’s God-Talk” on Beliefnet.com.

5. To quote Pratap Bhanu Mehta: “Master-servant relationship, rather
than being superceded, is the paradigm of most social relations in
India.” See his The Burden of Democracy (New Delhi: Penguin India,
2003), p. 89.

6. Barbara Harriss-White, India's Market Society: Three Essays in
Political Economy (New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2005).

7. For the many contradictions of American nationalism, Anatol Lieven,
America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (New York,
Oxford University Press, 2004).

8. Sita Ram Goel, India’s Secularism: New Name for National Subversion
(New Delhi: Voice of India, 1999) pp. 64, 67.

9. Quoted here from Gregory Treverton et al, “Exploring Religious
Conflict” (The Rand Corporation: National Security Research Foundation,
2005) available at http://www.rand.org.

10. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and
Politics Worldwide, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). p.
90. The World Values Survey (1981-2001) asked the question “Do you
believe in God?”

11. Data quoted here from Pavan Varma, Being Indian (Delhi: Penguin
India), p.96.

12. Donald Eugene Smith, “India as a Secular State,” in Secularism and
Its Critics, Rajeev Bhargava, ed. (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 178.

13. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Doubleday, 1967). Pp.
129, 108. Steve Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2002).

14. Craig James Hazen, Village Enlightenment in America: Popular
Religion and Science in the 19th Century (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2000).

15. Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New
York: Henry Holt, 2004).

16. For two competing accounts, see Issac Kramnick and R. L. Moore, The
Godless Constitution: The Case against Religious Correctness (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1997) and Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads of Modernity: The
British, French and American Enlightenments (New York: Knopf, 2005).

17. T.N. Madan, “Secularism in its place,” in Secularism and its
Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delih: Oxford University Press, 1998),
See also, N.S. Rajaram, Secularism: The New Mask of Fundamentalism (New
Dehli: Voice of India, 1995).

18. For a comprehensive account of the religious history of early
America, see George Marsden, Religion and American Culture (New York:
Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1990).

19. See Ronald Numbers, “Science without God: Natural Laws and Christian
Beliefs” in When Science and Christianity Meet, eds., David Lindberg and
Ronald L. Numbers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), George
Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids,
Michigan: William Eerdmans Co., 1991).

20. For a critical appreciation of the influence of naturalism on
American religion, see William Shea’s The Naturalists and the
Supernatural (Mercer University Press, 1984).

21. Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn, The Wheel of Law: India’s Secularism in
Comparative Constitutional Context. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003). Jacobsohn points out that the Dharma Chakra was modeled
after the Emperor Ashoka’s (b. 256 BCE) use of the charka on his famous
pillar at Sarnath.

22. A more detailed treatment is available in my book, The Wrongs of the
Religious Right: Reflections on Science, Secularism and Hindutva (New
Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2005).

23. Sita Ram Goel, India’s Secularism: New Name for National Subversion
(New Delhi: Voice of India. 1999), S. Gurumurthy, Eternal India and the
Constitution (New Delhi: India First Foundation, 2005).

24. Achin Vanaik, Communalism Contested: Religion, Modernity and
Secularization (New Delhi: Vistaar), p. 149.

25. Frank Morales, “Does Hinduism Teach that All Religions Are the
Same?: A Philosophical Critique of Radical Universalism,” at the
www.dharmacentral.com.

26. Interview with Deepak Chopra in John David Ebert, Twilight of the
Clockwork God (Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 1999), p. 135.
Back

27. This is a very large subject. I have examined some aspects of Vedic
science in my previous work, especially the Prophets Facing Backward:
Postmodernism, Science and Hindu Nationalism (New Bruswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2003).

28. Rajeev Bhargava, “What is secularism for?” in Secularism and its
Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,1998),
pp.486-543. See also Stephen Carter’s God’s Name in Vain. (New York:
Basic Books, 2000).

29. Nikki Keddie, The New Religious Politics: Where, When and Why do
“Fundamentalisms” Appear? Comparative Study of Society and History,
40(1998): 696-723.

30. Pew Center for Religion and Public Life, 2005. Religion and Public
life: A Faith-based partisan divide, Trends 2005. Available at
http://www.pewforum.org.

31. Andrew Kohut et al. The Diminishing Divide: Religion’s Changing Role
in American Politics. (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press,
2000). See also, see Jeffery Rosen, “Is Nothing Secular?” New York Times
Magazine, January 30, 2000.

32. See Alan Wolfe’s One Nation After All (New York: Penguin Books, 1998).

33. Samuel Huntington, “Dead Souls: the Denationalization of American
Elite.” The National Interest, March 22, 2004.

34. For India as the cradle and/or nursery of the “Aryans,” see Vasant
Kaiwar, “The Aryan Model of History and the Oriental Renaissance” in
Antinomies of Modernity, eds. Vasant Kaiwar and Sucheta Mazumdar,
(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005). For the cult of
Bharat Mata in contemporary India, see Lise McKean, Divine Enterprise:
Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996).

35. Meena Kandasamy, “Dangerous Cacophony,” Communalism Combat,
Nov.-Dec. 2004, Vol. 11, No.103, pp. 22-34.

36. Chris Fuller, The Renewal of the Priesthood (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003). See also Kandsamy for a vivid description of
many newly minted “timeless traditions,” note 35.

37. See John Harriss, “When a Great Tradition Globalizes: Reflections on
two studies of the “Industrial leaders” of Madras, Modern Asian Studies,
37 (2003): 327-362.

38. For how postmodernism aids theistic science, see Robert Pennock, The
Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against New Creationism (Boston: MIT Press,
2000. For a demystification of social constructivist relativization of
natural science, see Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense,
Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador USA, 1998).


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