At the Limits of the Secular by Barbieri William A.;Taylor Charles;

Author:Barbieri, William A.;Taylor, Charles;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 2014-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Deterritorialization

The deterritorialization of the contemporary cultural context further exacerbates these transformations of religious traditions. The nation-­state provided a spatial domain within which the consequences and consistency of belief and behavior could be evaluated as the basis for responsibility. Aiwa Ong has argued that American higher education has long addressed students as both rationally calculative professional actors and as citizens.82 The spatial overlap of these two roles provided an educational and anthropological synthesis that curricula or character alone could not achieve. Responsibility requires a heuristic space within which consequences of individual and collective action can appear. National space is not simply a matter of ideological commitment. The global perforation and erosion of the national scale deprive religious communities of the spatial scale within which they have spent much of the past two centuries imagining responsibility. Even if it could never be accepted as the only scale of responsibility, it was the fundamental one to which smaller and larger scales were articulated.

The unbundled space of the global order has no similar heuristic space within which consequences can appear and responsibility can be faced. This brings about the abstraction of religious doctrines and moral principles through a decline in systems of jurisprudence and casuistry. These forms of practical reason mediate between doctrines and practice in the complexity of life. This mediation depends on a manageable model of reality. Deterritorialization erodes shared understandings of the moral dimensions of everyday life, and thus the moral casuistry necessary to act within it. Doctrines and principles float free from the refractory difficulties of everyday life. As a result, they become increasingly abstract and essentialized, providing more fitting material for the task of identity projection than for active, transformative engagement in the world.

This moral deterritorialization exacerbates the fragmentation discussed above. We are not held together in common space to face the consequences of our beliefs and forms of life, to debate our complicity in them, or to act responsibly. Fragmentation and deterritorialization contribute to what is frequently described as the “relativism” of our epoch. This is misread if it is conceived as a principled commitment. The pluralism of culture and the lack of any shared anchoring in a heuristic space make finding a common basis for reason profoundly difficult.

Deterritorialization places religions alongside other discrete and autonomous normative orders that work within global space. This renders their practices similar to the operationalized practices of global capitalist firms. These do what they are able according to their own interests without concern for the consequences in their place of action. There is a danger that radical ecclesiologies exacerbate this problem by presenting such contexts as irredeemably flawed, and thus not capable of being constructively engaged. Such theological perspectives unwittingly reinforce the very disengagement that deterritorialization renders the cultural default.

Here we see a new way in which religion is “privatized.” Its presence is rendered illegible in a world where shared public space is being replaced by deterritorialized networks that do not comprise a whole. More than 1 billion people are now on Facebook — a population that would rank as the third largest country in the world.

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