Vincent P. Pecora. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-226-65311-2. Price: US$55.

The most compelling arguments in cultural criticism are those that proceed both within and without a given interpretive paradigm. “Ironic is not a bad word to use,” Edward Said wrote in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), to describe how the cultural critic simultaneously advances and critiques a position. It is surprising, then, to learn how poorly cultural criticism has performed vis-à-vis “the secularization thesis.” As Vincent P. Pecora puts it in his excellent study of this failure, “the humanistic scholarly recourse to the putatively neutral language of secular thought in a global age implicates us in an intellectual history that we at other times would like to disavow” (1). In short, cultural criticism, as a secular venture, “comes with certain historical and religious strings attached,” strings that “are awfully hard to get rid of” (2). Pecora graciously but relentlessly exposes these, which dangle awkwardly from the work of some of the most important modern cultural critics from Arnold and Durkheim to Benjamin, Adorno, Said, and Habermas. Pecora’s central contention is that modern cultural critics have aggressively promoted secularism while all the while remaining deeply ambivalent about what this actually means. Pecora relies on the French philosopher Jean-Claude Monod to characterize that ambivalence as entailing two contradictory positions. On the one hand, secularization signifies (in Monod’s words) “the retreat of religion as a dominant sphere and the reconstruction of institutions on a rational basis.” On the other hand, it “designates essentially a transfer” whereby “religion…continues to nourish modernity without its knowledge”: that is, a “worlding of Christianity” (qtd. in Pecora 5). Secularization as the retreat of irrational religion before the advance of reason “makes a…powerful claim on our epistemological sensibilities,” Pecora explains. Secularization, though, as the transfer of religion—i.e., the continuation of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition under a new name—“makes…irresistible claims on our ethical understanding” (6). Far, then, from the straightforward “demystifying, humanizing, materialist, and politically leveling” program that Weber described it to be (101), secularization has followed “a more circuitous, partial, and uneven path, one filled with digressions that periodically call its basic (Weberian) premises into question” (22). Pecora “creatively misuse[s]” Heidegger’s Verwindung (meaning “a going-beyond that is both an acceptance and a deepening” [21]) to describe “the twisting ambiguities and reversals of the secularizing process” (23), which reveal how “the society that produces Enlightenment never fully outgrows its desire for religious sources of coherence, solidarity, and historical purpose, and continually translates, or transposes, them into ever more refined and immanent, but also distorted and distorting, versions of its religious inheritance” (22). As presented in five well-crafted chapters, the range of cultural critics who haven’t quite “outgrown” the desire for religious sources and the variety of ways in which they transpose these sources into their work, are eye-opening. In the first chapter, Pecora shows how the contemporary generation of critics who followed Foucault in turning away from the classic Enlightenment binary of reason against revelation to critique the Enlightenment itself as a disciplinary regime have been somewhat blindsided by the “return” of religion, a point also made recently by Gauri Viswanathan (466). In Pecora’s view, the fairly recent return of criticism to the question of secularization has thus far lacked nuance, tending in postcolonial studies toward the “heroic secularism” of Edward Said or the “equivocating relativism” of Talal Asad (43) and in political theory toward either the retreat of religion before the enlightening advance of “the right” in John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas or a transference of religion into “the good” in Alasdair MacIntyre. (Habermas actually appears in Pecora’s rendering as a more ambivalent figure, increasingly invested …