The Secular State and Religious Conflict: Liberal Neutrality and the Indian Case of Pluralism

Balagangadhara, S.N.; Roover, Jakob De

doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2007.00268.x

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Similar critiques, interestingly, have been offered in regard to other religions. They have been put forward with the Indian context, for example, by S. N. Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover (2007), who go so far as to claim that only monotheisms-which they call "Semitic" (sic! see Anidjar 2008;Meer 2014) can be called religions-which implies a very 'Kantian' interpretation of 'religion'.…”

Section: Genealogies Of Religion Postsecularism and The Critique Of R...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Comparing Secularisms

Jansen

2017

Oxford Handbooks Online

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“Religio-secularism” denotes the tendency to understand specific cultural and political conflicts in terms an opposition between religion on the one hand and secularism on the other. Religio-secularism as a cultural-political paradigm tends to obscure the intricacies of political, socioeconomic, cultural-historical, religious, and ideological dimensions of specific situations (and often conflicts) that require complex analysis and evaluation. Religio-secularism, especially when it becomes the primary or exclusive framework for understanding cultural and political conflict, serves as an ideological barrier rather than an illuminating paradigm. Critique of the increasing grip of religio-secularism on political thinking, in contrast to the captivation with “postsecularism,” takes a reflexive attitude toward religio-secularism and its distorted lens through which to view the historical world. Other lenses should be used to survey contemporary events and situations related to religion, and this is particularly so with regard to conflicts over religion, religion in the public sphere, and secularism.

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Section: Genealogies Of Religion Postsecularism and The Critique Of R...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond Comparing Secularisms

Jansen

2017

Oxford Handbooks Online

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“…Much like Kabbani, Parker (1998) and many others 2 have shown that representations on Hinduism directly led to laws that disproportionately affected certain minority groups such as devadāsi (female performers) more than others. Such decontexualisation, however, is a pattern in many of the publications of Roover and Balagangadhara (2007). Even while discussing the role of the British East India Company's policies towards indigenous traditions and practices (169-173), Roover does not explicitly show that what was intrinsic here was the role of economics, in the form of international trade, that swayed the company's policies and that of the British government.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Subaltern agency and the problems in the project of decolonization in the study of religion and liberal secularism

Kannan

2019

Sikh Formations

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Decolonization has become an important process in the presentday academia. Reviewing Jakob De Roover's new book, this article critically analyses the problems in the methodologies of the decolonization project. The article strongly argues for the need to avoid decontexualisation of historical and contemporary developments, and to take an intersectional approach that would ensure the recognition of subaltern agency.

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“…That is, while the state confessed to its inability to determine the truth in matters of religion, it nevertheless accepted that religions were candidates for truth. This belief that religions can be true or false is presupposed by the liberal secular state (Balagangadhara and De Roover 2007).…”

Section: Liberal Democracy and False Religionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Dark Side of the “Secular”: Is the Religious-Secular Distinction a Binary?

Balagangadhara

2014

Numen

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Recent scholarship claims to have revealed the problematic nature of the religious-secular distinction: (1) the distinction is slippery or fluid; (2) the meanings of the words "religious" and "secular" have changed over multiple historical contexts; (3) the distinction is a binary; (4) it is essentialist in nature. Analyzing these objections, the article shows that it is very difficult to find a clear problem statement. To whom is the religious-secular distinction a problem and why? The distinction was originally made within Christian theology, where it concerned a triad rather than a binary: true religion, false religions, and the secular. The notion of the secular always required the presence of the opposition between truth and falsity in religion, because it was the sphere that remained after true and false religion had been demarcated. In this sense, the secular had a "dark side," namely idolatry or false religion. To a Christian believer, there is no conceptual problem involved in making the religious-secular distinction, because his theology helps him specify what true and false religion are and, as a consequence, what the secular is. However, because of its neutrality in religious matters, the liberal state has tried to reduce the theological triad to a binary opposition between religion and the secular. The inevitable failure of this attempt has created a formless secular sphere that is haunted by its dark side: the notion of false religion. Keywordsreligious and secular, secularization, false religion, idolatry, essentialism Sins of a Distinction?During the last decade, a great deal of attention has been paid to the distinction between the religious and the secular. Out of these discussions, the following consensus has emerged: making this distinction in the study of religion and elsewhere is problematic (Agrama

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The Secular State and Religious Conflict: Liberal Neutrality and the Indian Case of Pluralism

Cited by 17 publications

References 9 publications

Beyond Comparing Secularisms

Beyond Comparing Secularisms

Subaltern agency and the problems in the project of decolonization in the study of religion and liberal secularism

On the Dark Side of the “Secular”: Is the Religious-Secular Distinction a Binary?

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