The Decentering of the Secular

The so-called “return of religion” is deeply related to a shift of the main Western antagonist from communism to Islam after the fall of the Wall in 1989. Against the background of Islam, the split and inner connection between Christianity and the secular has become more visible, meaning that the secular lost its apparent neutrality. This paper analyzes different Western attempts of the last 20 years to respond to what I would call the decentering of the secular: the affirmation of the split and connection between the secular and Christianity and the claim of the exemplarity and universality of this western model (conservative liberalism); the attempt to recenter the secular as “post-secular” on the basis of the accepted persistence of religions (leftist liberalism); the affirmation of a culturally radical relativized secularization (Gianni Vattimo). Finally, I will indicate post- and decolonial approaches that are critical towards a complicity of Christianity and secularization and, based on that, suggest possibilities to deal with a radical decentering of the secular.