Journal of Religion & Society
Religion and Science from a Postsecular Perspective
Raphael Sassower and Jeffrey Scholes, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
Abstract
There are various ways in which religion and science have been perceived to interact in the cultural domain. After critically assessing the “separation view” of their relationship and finding it untenable, this essay recounts various “interaction views” wherein either religion or science is assumed to be taking precedence over or replacing in significance the other. This essay concludes with a “postsecular perspective” that sheds a different light on this relationship, claiming that discursively, religion and science inform and complement each other in American culture.
Keywords: postsecularism, religion, science, cultural domain, discourse
Introduction
The postsecular turn in religious studies, an instantiation of postmodernism, has undoubtedly been made in academia. In very general terms, those making the turn acknowledge that the strict separation between the sacred and the secular that results in a hierarchy is no longer an accurate portrayal of the relationship between the secular and the sacred as viewed in contemporary culture. Depending on which scholar one reads, postsecularism represents the failure of secularization, an extension of the secular, a reenchantment of culture, a resurgence of religion, or the harbinger of a new political reality (Beckford). Each representation may reach slightly different conclusions, some for ideological purposes, but common to all is the recognition that the secular has not made good on its promise to eliminate religion. Where does that leave the postsecular? It leaves it as more of an interpretative lens (or even a provocation to ask the right question, according
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