The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective

THE SECULAR CITY

THE SECULAR CITY

Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective

HARVEY COX

With a New Introduction by the Author

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2013 by Harvey Cox.

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The author wishes to thank the editors of The Commonweal and of Christianity and Crisis for permission to use material already published in those magazines, and to the Association Press for permission to use material that first appeared in their series of pamphlets Revolution and Response.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cox, Harvey Gallagher.

The secular city : secularization and urbanization in theological perspective / Harvey Cox ; with a new introduction by the author.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15885-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Church and the world. 2. Secularization (Theology) 3. City churches. 4. Cities and towns—United States. 5. Sociology, Urban. I. Title.

BR115.W6C65 2013

261—dc23     2013008390

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Janson

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Nina

CONTENTS

Introduction to the New Edition   xi

The Secular City: Twenty-Five Years Later   xli

Acknowledgments   lix

INTRODUCTION: The Epoch of the Secular City   1

PART ONE: THE COMING OF THE SECULAR CITY   19

1   The Biblical Sources of Secularization   21

Secularization vs. Secularism   22

Dimensions of Secularization   26

Creation as the Disenchantment of Nature   26

The Exodus as the Desacralization of Politics   30

The Sinai Covenant as the Deconsecration of Values   37

2   The Shape of the Secular City   46

Anonymity   47

The Man at the Giant Switchboard   49

Anonymity as Deliverance from the Law   56

Mobility   60

The Man in the Cloverleaf   62

Yahweh and the Baalim   65

3   The Style of the Secular City   72

John F. Kennedy and Pragmatism   74

Albert Camus and Profanity   84

Tillich, Barth, and the Secular Style   94

4   The Secular City in Cross-Cultural Perspective   102

New Delhi and India   104

Rome and Western Europe   107

Prague and Eastern Europe   110

Boston and the United States   114

PART TWO: THE CHURCH IN THE SECULAR CITY   123

5   Toward a Theology of Social Change   125

The Kingdom of God and the Secular City   131

Anatomy of a Revolutionary Theology   135

6   The Church as God’s Avant-garde   148

The Church’s Kerygmatic Function: Broadcasting the Seizure of Power   151

The Church’s Diakonic Function: Healing the Urban Fractures   157

The Church’s Koinoniac Function: Making Visible the City of Man   171

7   The Church as Cultural Exorcist   177

PART THREE: EXCURSIONS IN URBAN EXORCISM   195

8   Work and Play in the Secular City   197

The Separation of Places of Work and Residence   198

The Bureaucratic Organization of Work   204

The Emancipation of Work from Religion   214

9   Sex and Secularization   227

The Residue of Tribalism   228

Remnants of Town Virtues   242

10   The Church and the Secular University   257

PART FOUR: GOD AND THE SECULAR MAN   283

11   To Speak in a Secular Fashion of God   285

Speaking of God as a Sociological Problem   288

Speaking of God as a Political Issue   294

Speaking of God as a Theological Question   304

Bibliography   321

Index   329

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

Every aspiring author hopes that thousands of people will read the book he writes, but secretly wonders if anyone will. When the Macmillan Company published The Secular City in 1965, after several other publishers had turned it down, I was no exception. So imagine my happy surprise when it quickly went into multiple printings, became an international best seller, was translated into fourteen languages, and eventually reached nearly a million readers. Journals devoted entire issues to it, and I received invitations to exotic places to defend it, debate its critics (there were many), or elaborate on it. In 1990 a twenty-fifth anniversary edition was published. Now, after nearly half a century, the book, or parts of it, is still being translated, most recently into Chinese and Bulgarian. And here we have this forty-eighth anniversary edition. It all still seems quite amazing.

In retrospect the book’s chances did not look that promising. I wrote it after I returned from a year of intensive study and teaching in Berlin, and my writing bristled with references to scholars like Friedrich Gogarten, Alfons Auer, and Gerhard Ebeling, whom most people had never heard of. In a still very religious America, I drew heavily on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas about how we need a nonreligious interpretation of the Gospel in order to speak in a secular fashion of God. I maintained that there were many positive features about secularization, and that its key components were derived from the biblical faith. All in all it seemed like a somewhat unlikely, even quixotic enterprise. Why then did the book gain so much attention?

I think the answer is threefold: the appeal of the basic theme of the book, the minor hullabaloo it stirred up, and lucky timing. First, the theme: My premise was that we meet God not just in religion or in church history, but in all of life, including its political and cultural aspects. I harked back to the ancient Israelites, who did not encounter God in myths or nature but in the events of history, including their defeats. Therefore, my original title had been God in the Secular City, but my editor shook his head. It would sell better, he advised, simply as The Secular City. I had my doubts, but I reluctantly agreed. It was my first book, and I was hopeful that someone—anyone—would want to read it. The editor was probably right, but the shortened American title, without the word God, prompted some critics to mistakenly relegate me to the group of so-called death of God theologians of the 1960s, although in my last chapter I forcefully differed with them. Then there was the controversy it kicked up. The book kindled a vociferous debate, and as every literary agent knows, controversy sells. Some liberal critics said I was too narrowly biblical. Conservatives thought I attached too much significance to the world instead of to the church. It should be added that as an original paperback, the book cost only $1.45, so teachers felt free to assign it to college and seminary classes. Even when it did not make the official bibliography, students still read it. Years later, people who were studying at evangelical institutions told me it was a kind of underground sensation. The fact that I related religion to the Miss America Pageant, Playboy magazine, and campus sex undoubtedly contributed to its allure.

My timing was also lucky. The book came out just as the Second Vatican Council concluded in 1965, and Roman Catholics, awakened by the turn of events in Rome, bought lots of copies. Nuns, always at the forefront, or even ahead of, Catholic theology, took to it with special enthusiasm. Daniel Callahan published a collection of critical reviews entitled The Secular City Debate. When I met Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1967, he shook my hand warmly and told me that he had been reading it, and that although he did not agree with everything, nonetheless he had read it with great interest.

Now, nearly half a century later, opening this offspring of my youthful enthusiasm again has often made me smile but also raised my eyebrows more than once. Like everyone else, I have grown more cautious as I’ve aged, but back then I wasn’t cautious at all, so I blinked at the book’s ambitious sweep and ingenuous brashness. But I can also see that I was undoubtedly too swayed by the reigning academic consensus of the time, that religion was in decline, and that this falling off would inevitably continue as nation after nation advanced into the modern era.

Today it is obvious that such a downturn has not taken place, and this sharp reversal of fortune for the scholarly soothsayers does affect some of the details of The Secular City. But it does not undercut its basic thesis. My interest was not primarily historical or sociological. It was theological. The core question I asked, suggested by my original intended title, still holds: How is the biblical God, who acts in history, and not just in the church, present in our history today?

The heart of the book is an analysis of the dynamic interplay between the religious and the secular, and questions about this tortuous relationship are even more pressing today. It is worth noting that after the brief, heated flurry that arose about The Secular City, the hubbub subsided for a while. But in more recent years a fresh torrent of books and articles devoted to such themes as the postsecular society, after secularization, and even the death of the death of God has flooded academic and church circles.

Why this second coming? Why has the debate The Secular City helped to ignite leaped into life again? The reasons are not hard to discern. Europeans and Americans differ from each other about the secular and the appropriate relationship between religion, culture, and politics. But both are discovering that their assumptions about the role of religion in modern society places them in a distinct minority in a world that is also becoming modern, but that remains persistently religious. In turn, this recognition resuscitated an even more fundamental question about what we mean by the secular and by its counterpart, religion. The issues I had wrestled with fifty years ago are on the agenda.

I do not believe this new wave of interest is spurred by the resacralization that some observers speak of. It is due rather to the fact that certain deep-seated religious impulses have never died. They had once remained under the radar, out of sight of cultural elites, but they are now becoming more assertive and visible. I believe one of the main reasons for the return to visibility of religion in the secular city is the enormous impact of globalization. In the non-Western world, the imposition of Western laws, education, capitalist economic practices, and colonialism temporarily suppressed these currents and practices. Also, in some cases, colonized peoples, in their struggle for independence, have often turned to religious traditions to retrieve symbols and rituals to rally around as catalysts against a domination originating in the secular Christian West. Still, the so-called return of the sacred is not just a bubble floating on a deeper political stream. Nor is it confined to the Southern Hemisphere. It isn’t even a return. Rather, it represents the surfacing of something that has been there all along, a spiritual dimension of human existence that is now undergoing multiple mutations and reappearing in a myriad of new and old ways all over the globe. Instead of the death of God, what we see is the rebirth of the gods and goddesses.

When I wrote The Secular City one could still speak of Western religions and Asian ones. That is no longer the case. Now mosques have risen in dozens of European cities, and Buddhist temples glisten in nearly every state in America. Christianity is growing rapidly on the Asian rim and in China. In fact, about 1990 the tipping point was reached: it is no longer accurate to speak of Christianity as a Western religion. The majority of Christians now live outside the West, and that majority is growing. This change has brought Europeans and Americans literally face-to-face with the recognition that our various Western patterns of separating the religious from the secular (laïcité in France, church-state separation in America) consign us to a distinct minority. Secularization, which many had considered a universal, indeed historically inevitable process, is turning out to be a regional one. Europe has been provincialized. The question of the proper place of religion in the modern world, which was once considered to be settled, is now open again. So how is this newly energized discussion proceeding?

It would require a whole new volume to survey the stacks of books and articles about secularization that have appeared since 1965. Some of these are historical. They ask how and why secularization happened. Some are sociological. They probe the convoluted trade-offs between the sacred and the profane in different cultures. But only a few touch on the theological significance of secularization.

One of the most influential voices in the new debate is that of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. In his monumental (850-page) opus, A Secular Age, Taylor contends that secularization can be understood only against the background of Latin Christendom, not, however, as its product but more like its distortion. He also points out that central to our mentality in this secular age is that we understand our era to be different from what came before, and better. We have moved beyond the religious stage of human history into our present secular stage. He calls it our stadial consciousness: "it was once like that, but now it is like this."

Taylor makes a strong case for an open, no-holds-barred discussion among all the parties that cohabit this present age. But his most original insight in crafting this formidable book is to suggest, in effect, that the stadial process is not over. He does so by pointing to a few cracks in the exclusive humanism that often accompanies secularism. He detects a continued hankering for some kind of transcendence in an allegedly secular age, and refers us to the Peggy Lee song, Is That All There Is? In other words, this thing is not over yet.

Taylor is a philosopher, but makes his case as a social historian by distinguishing three levels of secularization. The first level is the institutional separation of religion (the church) from the state. The second is a palpable decline in the practice of religious rites, such as church attendance. The third is a change in the conditions of belief, the cultural atmosphere, what Taylor terms the social imaginary. Taylor’s book has rightly evoked many plaudits, but also a host of critical responses, which take one of two forms. The first questions whether the religious age from which our current secular age has descended (or ascended) was really as religious as has generally been believed. The second criticism, picking up on hints that Taylor himself drops, holds that our present secular age, including its social imaginary, may not be all that secular after all.

Both these responses to Taylor are spelled out by scholars writing in an important collection (Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun [Harvard University Press, 2010]). They insist that all three levels of Taylor’s description of secularization are questionable. Church-state separation, they remind us, is not a fixed concept but variegated and historically conditioned. It appears in a widely diverse form from time to time and place to place. French laïcité, American separation of church and state, and British established church secularity are not the same. They grew out of separate histories. Grouping them all into one category obscures the variety.

What about Taylor’s second level, that of religious practice? Some of these critics question just how much of a decline there has actually been. They summon statistics from the medieval period bewailing sparse church attendance, and clergy complaints from later centuries about laxity and apathy. Thus they remind us that the premodern period, when according to Taylor belief was axiomatic, an era of nearly universal religiousness, was actually seething with heresies on the one hand and somnolent with indifference on the other. Otherwise, why did the Catholic Church need to resort to racks and thumbscrews? The answer is obvious. It wanted to get the deviant and the slothful back into line. But as the records show, this met with only mixed success. Heterodoxy and inertia persisted.

Regarding Taylor’s conditions of belief, some scholars raise a question I have already mentioned. Did secularization really originate in tensions within Christianity itself? Or was a principal cause the shock of recognition the West felt during its global expansion when it made two upsetting discoveries? One was that there are alternative religions. The other was that the process of secularization is not the universal one many had previously imagined but a quite provincial one. By raising questions both about what religion is and about the scope of secularism, didn’t this Western encounter with the other affect these conditions of belief in the West itself?

I have come to agree with Taylor’s critics, especially on this last point. Clearly, I did not mention the encounter with the non-West as an important factor in my book. But I had a better excuse than Taylor to overlook it. It was because although decolonization was well under way in the 1960s, we were barely beginning to think about its theological repercussions. Postcolonial theology had not yet been born. I will return to this point below.

When I read Taylor’s book, I had several reactions. I was dazzled by his erudition and his irenical style. But I was also intrigued by the way his argument overlaps in part with The Secular City and by the ways it challenges elements of it. For example, like Taylor, I wrote that secularization must be understood in terms of its religious sources. But I looked further back than to tensions within Latin Christendom. I went back to the ancient Hebrews and to the disenchantment of nature, politics, and morality brought about by the Creation story, the Exodus, and the Sinai covenant. If I were writing that section today, I would go even deeper, to what is called the axial age, when around 500 BCE the discovery of transcendence in three different cultures released human beings from their embeddedness in cosmic-nature religions and gave them a prophetic point of reference from which to criticize and change their societies. (See Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution [Harvard University Press, 2011].)

There is another point at which Taylor’s and my reading of the prehistory of secularization differ. Throughout his book Taylor is consistently severe with what he calls reform, the effort among some Christians to purify the faith and to bring everyone into line with some standard practice or doctrinal formula. He believes this reforming excarnates religion from society and eventually leads to secularization. He believes the impulse started in earnest just prior to the Reformation, but then took hold in the West in the centuries that followed.

I also regret this creedalism in Christianity, but I would locate that development much earlier. In my most recent book, The Future of Faith (HarperOne, 2010), I suggested that the most critical and regrettable turning point for Christianity came in the fourth century with the alleged conversion of Constantine, and his insistence that in the interests of imperial unity, the squabbling bishops had to compose a creed to which everyone would have to adhere, or else. At that point, official Christianity ceased being a way of life and began to clot into a clerically led and doctrinally defined religion fiercely enforced by imperial power.

The first martyr to this fatal curdling was a Christian bishop and teacher, Priscillian of Ávila, who, along with six of his followers, was beheaded by edict of the emperor Maximus in 385 CE for his theologically incorrect ideas. Today it hardly seems that Priscillian’s teachings should land him on death row. He counseled his disciples to abstain from meat and wine, and to study some of the noncanonical writings, although he agreed they were not inspired. His position was much like that of Elaine Pagels, who quips that the noncanonical Gospels (of Thomas, Mary, Barnabas, and others) may not belong in the canon but that they do have some value and don’t belong in the scrap can either. Priscillian was a reasonable man and by all accounts a pious Christian. But he was the first in a woefully long list of Christians murdered by their fellow Christians for their lack of creedal correctness. Some historians estimate that in the two and a half centuries after Constantine and the Nicene Creed (which was supposed to unite believers), some twenty-five thousand more joined him at the block or pyre. I strongly disagree with some of the critics of Taylor who dismiss him as a Catholic apologist, but I cannot help suspecting that here one might detect a faint residue of the traditional Catholic theory that the Reformation is to blame for much of what went wrong in Christianity. The malignancy started earlier.

Notwithstanding these differences, I also noticed in reading Taylor that at points his overall objectives seem quite parallel to mine. For example, one of my principal goals in The Secular City was to advocate an open conversation among various worldviews. Consequently, I drew a sharp distinction between secularization and secularism, which was central to my entire argument. Since this difference is so pivotal, I quote it here:

Secularization [is] a descriptive term … But wherever it appears it should be carefully distinguished from secularism. Secularization implies a historical process … in which society and culture are delivered from tutelage to religious control and closed metaphysical worldviews … Secularism, on the other hand … is an ideology, a new closed worldview. While secularization finds its roots in the biblical faith itself, … this is not the case with secularism. It is a closed system. It menaces the openness and freedom secularization has produced; and it must be watched carefully to prevent its becoming the ideology of a new establishment. (Secular City, 34, 35)

In part because I devoted many pages in The Secular City to identifying a kind of hidden religiousness in the secular era, I have been pleased to see this analysis continued by recent writers. Religion, this interpretation suggests, has not disappeared at all. It has been transmuted into different institutional expressions and has dispersed into wider ranges of the culture. One of the most articulate representatives of this view is Peter van der Veer, a professor at the University of Utrecht and director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religion (Göttingen), who points out that if secularization implies what Max Weber called disenchantment, then we are far from disenchanted today. Rather, the enchantment has simply migrated into the market and into money, both of which are supercharged with magical and ritual qualities. Simply because we do not ordinarily think of these phenomena as religious does not, says van der Veer, diminish the fact that they are. We have just been misled by the provincial Western practice of walling off religion as a sphere separate from politics and the economy, something few, if any, other cultures do. Just as in a previous period of history spiritual zeal migrated from religious groups, narrowly defined, and attached itself to national loyalties, symbols, and narratives, so today this energy has migrated into the economy. Once we had the Te Deum and Gothic cathedrals. Then we had the Marseilles and the monumental edifices of national states. Now, says van der Veer, we have advertising jingles, and our temples are the grandiose towers and hushed interiors of the international banks and financial institutions with their adepts, priests, and mysteries. The market religion’s theologians, the economists, argue their conflicting theories about how and why things go wrong (the Fall and Sin) and what to do to achieve social and individual prosperity (Salvation).

I wish van der Veer had gone just a little further. The market god he describes is not only omnipresent, it is also omnivorous. The consumer capitalist theology that informs it teaches that it must constantly grow, or die. Its appetite is insatiable and infinite. But we live on a finite planet, with limited resources of land, water, air, and hydrocarbons. Market theology thus contains the rudiment of an apocalypse. Sometime in the future an inevitable collision between a system that demands infinity and our finite planet will occur. There are earth scientists who believe that this moment may not be far off, and they are not getting their data from the book of Revelation (see my article Mammon and the Culture of the Market: A Socio-Theological Critique, in Meaning and Modernity, ed. Richard Madsen et al. [University of California Press, 2002], 124).

Finally, the scholar who may have shaken and enriched the current discussion about secularization the most is Talal Asad, a Saudi-born anthropologist who teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (see his Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity [University of California Press, 2003]). Unlike Taylor, who explicitly limits his investigation to the West, Asad recognizes that secularization must be understood in a global and cross-cultural context. He also emphasizes that in any useful conversation about secularization, the naked reality of power must be included in the equation. This is a dimension Taylor, a philosopher with a bent toward the history of ideas, also short-circuits.

I think Asad is right that Western secularization not only cannot be understood without bringing the rest of the world into the picture, but that it might never have happened without the West’s encounter with the other world, and without the special conditions under which that encounter took place—namely, colonialism. Asad also usefully complicates the picture by pointing out that the principal philosophy informing secularization, the Enlightenment, was hardly nonreligious. It was, rather, a surrogate religion. It was surely anticlerical (as many religious movements have been) and even anti-Christian, at least in its French version. But what it did was to substitute one grounding myth for another. The world was still in need of redemption, but now instead of looking to the God of traditional Christian theism, the Enlightenment hailed Nature as the deep reality that transcended the corrupted man-made institutions of men. The rights of man were not God-given but were the de facto benefits of Nature as revealed by Reason. Thus, at the height of the French Revolution, inspired in large measure by the Enlightenment, the Jacobins bore a woman crowned as the goddess of Reason in solemn procession through the streets of Paris and enthroned her in Notre Dame Cathedral. It is worth noting here something that Asad does not dwell on. There was not just one Enlightenment but several. In America, for example, the founders managed to straddle two myths by speaking about Nature and Nature’s God. The French recognized this difference. The statue they gave to the new republic across the ocean was not of Reason but of Liberty.

Implicit in Asad’s point about the religiousness of the Enlightenment is the recognition that there is indeed an element of continuity between the most recent stages in Taylor’s stadial schema. But when Asad turns to his trenchant discussion of power, the whole picture changes, revealing a pivotal factor to which neither Taylor nor I devoted sufficient attention, a serious omission.

Like most of those who write about the history of secularization, Asad asks why it emerged. But then he takes a further step. Who supported it, and why? Who resisted it, and why? These are straightforward questions. But they shine a bright light into what have sometimes been the dark corners of the history of secularization. And, once the light is on, the answers to the questions are easier to find.

First, secularization provided a rallying point for the emerging merchant classes, since it promised freedom from bothersome religious constraints to profit making, like the doctrine of the just price, or the religious disapproval of usury. Also, secularization was an idea the rulers of the nation-states also found attractive. It meant that the vexing problem of the divided loyalty of their subjects, to both the Crown and to the universal church, could be eliminated or weakened. With the triumph of nationalism one was now first and foremost a citizen (or a subject). The authority of religion was vanquished to an ever-diminishing spiritual sphere, and, at least for the secular rulers, good riddance. Clearly, as an ideology secularism worked to the benefit of certain elites, but not for everyone else. Unlike considerable parts of the Protestant Reformation or the American Great Awakenings, it was never a widely popular cause. There are not many folk songs celebrating secularism. Today, in our globalized world, it remains an elite ideology, and was never welcomed by large majorities either in the West or elsewhere.

Asad also demonstrates that the rulers of those European countries who imposed some form of secularism not only kept their own divided and unruly populations in line better, they were also enabled to project their imperial ambitions more effectively. France, Great Britain, Holland, and Germany might be at each other’s throats at home, but they could present a more or less united civilizing mission in a world still shrouded in superstition and ignorance in the South and the East. This strategy may have seemed brilliant at the time. It was even swallowed by upper echelons of the native populations. The children of the higher-caste Indians who were groomed for administrative posts in the Raj were taught to memorize Rudyard Kipling’s poems about taking up the white man’s burden. Brilliant for a time, perhaps, but it thrust the whole idea of secularism into doubt when, in the last half of the twentieth century, the empire began to strike back.

This striking back has assumed some unexpected expressions. Since God obviously has a sense of humor, one of its most unanticipated guises is the small piece of dyed fabric some women wear on their heads. Not since rival parties in the ancient church came to blows over whether the priestly blessing should be administered with two fingers or three has such a seemingly tiny thing caused such a ruckus. Of course, like the matter of how many fingers, in the head scarf controversy, not just in France but in other countries as well, a great deal more is at stake.

At bottom, the scuffle over the scarves is about a crisis in Europe’s Enlightenment-Secular self-understanding. It is a replay, this time on home soil, of the narrative that once played out abroad. But the same arguments and prejudices are still advanced. Sometimes scarves are attacked in the name of laïcité, nationalism, and citizenship, sometimes in the name of Judeo-Christian values. But some of the same hoary old arguments are reloaded and fired. Recently a member of Parliament in the Danish People’s Party has likened the head scarf to the swastika. Muslims, says Pia Kjaersgaard, an anti-immigrant spokeswoman, "are people at a lower level of civilization, with their own primitive and cruel customs like honor killings, forced marriages, halal slaughtering, and blood feuds … They have come to a Denmark that left the dark ages hundreds of years ago (Paul Hockenos, Europe’s Rising Islamophobia," Nation, May 9, 2011, p. 12).

Most Americans chuckled in disbelief that the French were making such a fuss. All this about a tiny piece of cloth? Hardly: regarding the head scarf, arguments about a swarm of divisive topics—secularity, gender, politics, and religion—all come roaring back. In fact, the scarf is a particularly fitting target for this modern holy war since it is a superb example of the multiple meanings that can be imposed on a single object. It is useless to ask the question, "What does the scarf mean?" It has no inherent meaning. It means whatever its wearer or its viewer wants it to, and the two often vary. Practices and sanctions also vary. Until recently, in Turkey a woman was not permitted to appear in court wearing one, but in Saudi Arabia she could not appear in public without one.

How we dress often makes a big difference in history. From the sansculotte of the French Revolution to the Mao jackets of China, attire makes a statement. Historians remind us that during the period of French (and other) colonialism, wearing Muslim dress was often a quiet but visible expression of rebellion. Worn in Europe today, for some Europeans it conjures a dark fear of the Islamization of the Continent. For many Muslim women who wear it in public settings, however, it sends a double message. To the secular Christian world it says, "I am a Muslim woman, proud of my cultural heritage, and I refuse to bow to the latest fashion dictates from Prada. But to her Muslim—especially male—coreligionists, the scarf-wearing woman is saying, I am a Muslim woman, taking my rightful place in the public arena. I am ‘out.’ I will not languish in the kitchen or the loll in the harem."

The scarf controversy is only one among many signals suggesting that the inherited Euro-American narrative of upward evolution from religious obscurantism into secular modernity has become highly questionable. It was a myth, a narrative that for a long time many of us in the West told anyone who would listen. If our secularism seemed to be a minority position in the world, we assured ourselves that we were simply ahead of the game. The rest of them would catch up sooner or later. We expected to see our narrative reenacted in the non-Western world, and meanwhile, our version of world history provided a credible rationale for Euro-American dominance. It was quite a yarn, but its threads are coming unwoven,