The Spirituality of a Pluralist: A Theological Reading of Connolly’s Why I Am Not A Secularist

“The need today […] is to rewrite secularism to pursue an ethos of engagement in public life among a plurality of controversial metaphysical perspectives, including, for starters, Christian and other monotheistic perspectives, secular thought, and asecular, nontheistic perspectives.”¹

It is not enough to affirm intellectually the existence of those who are different from us. Robust pluralism requires that we become people who can affirm difference physiologically and spiritually as well. Such is the challenge that William E. Connolly addressed in Why I Am Not a Secularist. Critiques and revisions of secularism have become common since Connolly published this book in 1999.² His text still warrants attention amidst more recent studies, because of the constructive, normative character of his critique. The point of elaborating the flaws of the secularist is to enable the formation of the plural-ist: a reflective participant in public life who does not believe in the possibility of a singular, authoritative basis for that life, and thus is not compelled to maintain or attain that particular identity. Letting go of debates about how to form a more tolerant public center, Connolly envisioned “complex networks of interdependence and intercommunication unfiltered through a definitive racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, sensual, or transcendental center.”³ The problem is the ideal of the center itself, and tolerance does not fix the problem. Tolerance “implies benevolence toward others amid stability of ourselves.”⁴ In contrast, pluralism decenters everyone.

In this essay, I respond to Connolly’s invitation to consider the validity and viability of what he calls deep, multidimensional pluralism: an approach to ontology, epistemology, and the everyday that overtly welcomes metaphysical as well as religious diversity. Within the vast waters of secular studies, I anchor to the critique that secularism is a vehicle of rationalism which depreciates the body and spirit. Then I build a bridge of affinity between Connolly’s perspective (shaped by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt) and the Christian contemplative tradition (represented here by Catholic theologian Karl Rahner and Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley). This bridge is built through a brief comparison of essential practices and non-foundational approaches to metaphysics, defined as the study of the fundamental nature of reality. Standing on this rudimentary bridge, I affirm what I identify as the spirituality animating Why I Am Not a Secularist.⁵ This spirituality of pluralism might be developed into a powerful resource for those of us swimming against authoritarian, fascist, and white supremacist currents in the United States and Europe.

Living together well despite profound moral, cultural, and structural differences is a holistically challenging process that engages the mind, the body, and what has been called the spirit, the psyche, or the soul. If we act as if it were sufficient to have the right ideas about pluralism, we will fail to prepare ourselves for the conflicts that inevitably arise. We also forego the creativity and compassion that can emerge through holistic engagement with self and others. Social theories and policies that leave out the body and the spirit reflect the training of people literally defined by the intellect, people called intellectuals. The tendency to focus on ideas also reflects larger socio-material, historical conditions marked by rationalization and secularization, conditions that have affected the experience of being human. To use terms from philosopher Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, we have become “mind-centered,” “disengaged, rational agents,” as the world has become what Max Weber called disenchanted. And, unfortunately, we cannot simply think our way through social differences.

Like Taylor, Connolly has connected secularization with a diminished appreciation of human life. Unlike Taylor, who is a practicing Roman Catholic, Connolly is not religious. Yet, as Connolly announced in his book’s title, neither is he a secularist. To be clear, both would defend the ostensible goal of some forms of secularism to truly include people of all backgrounds in public life. They find detrimental theories and manifestations of the secular that make public life untenably thin. In Why I Am Not a Secularist, Connolly depicted a space that no...