Religion in Public by Pritchard Elizabeth;

Author:Pritchard, Elizabeth; [Pritchard, Elizabeth A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

6

They’re Only Words, But They’re Killing Me Softly

In previous chapters I described one of Locke’s strategies for dialing down the volatility of religious dissent as the conversion of religion from body (persecution, property, inheritance) to alterable speech act (argument, text, fashion). I referred to this as Locke’s secularizing of religion: making religion worldly and thus amenable to the cosmopolitan and promiscuous mixing of individuals. Nonetheless, I also argued that Locke was caught between a sense that religion converted to words might make its battles merely political and a conviction that society was held together by religion, specifically religion that was more than, or perhaps earlier than, words. I think this Locke has more relevance to our contemporary period than the Locke of the public and private, state and church, body and spirit binaries of religious toleration.

Contemporary conflicts are generally attributed to so-called Islamicists or fundamentalists ignoring the divide between state and church, religion and politics, or public and private. In other words, the Lockean legacy I have called into question is repeatedly trotted out to explain religious conflict. Yet just as this rubric proves inadequate for understanding Locke’s multipronged approach to religious dissent, I think it fails to capture the complexity and tenacity of contemporary antagonisms. Drawing lessons from my reconstruction of Locke, I suggest, instead, that a predominant feature of contemporary secularism and its discontents is a persistent conflation of speech and body, persuasion and coercion, and politics and war—a conflation that suggests a highly unstable spectrum of force and that admits of no easy solution. Moreover, this is the case despite the nearly universal consensus as to the validity and primacy of human rights.

In what follows I first document the modern attribution of power and violence to words, specifically religious speech designated as “proselytization.” I provide a brief sketch of both the international and U.S. contexts. I then turn to a discussion of what these conflicts indicate about contemporary secularity and about the meaning and practice of politics in a secular context. In the third and concluding section of this chapter I discuss an explicit appropriation of Locke: the “overlapping consensus” of John Rawls. I do so in order to suggest affinities between Locke’s political theology and contemporary liberalism.

Although he was well aware of the force and possible rough usage of speech, I suspect that Locke would be surprised by the extent to which religious speech is currently regarded as capable of inflicting injury, destroying culture, derailing politics, and amounting to a declaration of war. It is perhaps stating the obvious to remark that words cross greater distances and travel at faster speeds than at the time of Locke. Spoken words still journey across slender spans separating bodies, yet printed words increasingly give way to electronic words. Although Locke and Mendelssohn may have doubted the clarity and power of a textual culture, the enchantment and omnipresence of textual media seems inescapable. Circulating words and images continue to accumulate weight, exert force, and orchestrate the attention, comportment, and connectivity of bodies.

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