Publications

Recent political conflicts have highlighted the influence of religious actors and organisations in the public spheres of Latin American countries. The Pentecostal Evangelical movement in Colombia was crucial to the success of the ‘No’ campaign in the 2016 plebiscite, in which citizens rejected the peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In Brazil, evangelical congregations played a central role during the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, and in the subsequent rise of Jair Bolsonaro. In Bolivia, evangelical leaders and conservative elements of the Catholic Church alike supported the 2019 coup against Evo Morales. In Mexico, the 2018 rise of left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been accompanied by criticism of his proximity to religious actors, and his moralising political rhetoric. Some authors have even described the Mexican leader as a politician with messianic overtones. Against this background, it is worth asking what the implications of the recent convergence between politics and religion in Latin America are. To answer this question, we must avoid the oversimplification of suggesting a singular process of religious advance in Latin American societies. It is important to instead highlight the complex interaction of: 1) the process of secularisation (involving both secularism and secularity) in the region, 2) the trend towards pluralisation of the religious field, 3) the concurrence of counter-secular expressions in the public space, 4) and the occurrence of conflict in the political arena. Although secularisation in Latin America historically emerged as a process of distinction of the political sphere, I argue here that it is currently expressed as a democratic ideal through the process of the dispersal in society of certain secular notions favouring state autonomy, especially in those countries that maintain the secularism legally established in the nineteenth century. My approach raises the question of how the boundaries between religion and the state in Mexico have been defined historically, and what the current status of this differentiation is. I also advance the analytical notion of sacred secularism, as a principle and expectation in the public space.

This volume collects reflections on secularity from the Middle East and North Africa. To highlight proximate connections as well as resonances with debates elsewhere, it includes premodern contributions from the region as well as Jewish thought from Europe that have provided significant references for modern appropriations of secularity. The texts, for the most part previously untranslated, reflect commonalities within the region as well as its great diversity. Thus, while Islam is a common reference for most of our authors, the selections point to its varied invocations in the interest of differing political ends. Others write from a Christian or Jewish perspective, or subscribe to non-religious intellectual traditions. They range from premodern Muslim jurisprudents and philosophers to Ottoman statesmen, Arab socialist and nationalist intellectuals of the interwar period, Iranian revolutionaries, Israeli novelists, and finally, post-secular intellectuals, lay and religious, predominantly from the former Islamic heartland: modern Arab states and Iran. Several introductions weave together the swathe of topics raised in the discussions, beginning with a schematic presentation of the concerns that undergird the volume’s organization.

Zemmin, Florian, Neguin Yavari, Markus Dressler, and Nurit Stadler, eds. Global Secularity: A Sourcebook. Vol 2, The Middle East and North Africa. Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2024.

With the assertion of Buddhism as the dominant religion at the end of the 16th century, a new reflection on the relationship between the secular and the religious commenced among the Mongols. They adopted the Joint Twofold System of Governance formulated in Buddhist Tibet, and adapted it to the Mongolian cultural context. This system of governance is described in the work “The White History”, written in the late 16th century, with the epistemic distinctions between the religious and the secular discursively negotiated in the work. Although the impact of these distinctions on the social differentiations of Mongolian society during the Qing period (1644–1911) remains to be investigated, the “White History” nonetheless provides a valuable insight into pre-modern Mongolian notions of the distinction between the religious and the secular.