PD Dr. Ugo Dessì

Aiming to integrate the discussion on multiple secularities into a comprehensive model for the study of Japanese religions within global dynamics, I adopt the working hypothesis that the emergence of “globally-oriented” identities within Japanese religions is generally prompted by two main relativising forces: the intensified connectivity within the global cultural network; and global polycentric functional differentiation understood as the declining scope of religious authority. These two relativising forces can affect the authority-structure of religious systems in diverse ways, thus prompting their global repositioning under three different modalities. The first modality implies repositioning at the inter-religious level (exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism, multiple commitments/conversion), the second occurs at the discrete-elements level (anti-homogenisation, glocalisation, chauvinistic glocalisation, homogenisation), and the third at the inter-systemic level (anti-secularisation, secularisation, conditional secularisation, stopgap function). I contend that the multiple secularities approach offers precious insights into the third modality of religions’ global repositioning occurring at the inter-systemic level. In my research project, I apply Wohlrab-Sahr’s and Burchardt’s interpretive scheme based on four forms of secularity (for the sake of individual rights and liberties; for the sake of balancing/pacifying religious diversity; for the sake of national integration and development; for the sake of the independent development of functional domains of society) to the modern Japanese context to provide further support for the understanding of conditional secularisation as the result of border negotiations between religion and other social systems. Among the various examples of such dynamics, there are indications that the first kind of secularity (for the sake of individual rights and liberties) operates in the Japanese Constitution and its mainstream interpretation, and that a surplus of secularity might also have been contrived for the sake of pacifying religious diversity through the 1995 revisions to the Religious Corporation Law. Moreover, the 2006 revisions to the Fundamental Law of Education suggest that national cohesion and progress can also be sought after through a counter-secularisation move, while those to the Organ Transplant Law (2009), ended with the establishment of strictly non-religious criteria for the legal definition of death.