WILLIAM E. CONNOLLYIndeed, the most popular definition of contemporary ‘‘Europe’’ itself—as presented
by those constituencies who define themselves as embodying its essence—is that to be
European is to express religious belief in the private realm and to participate as abstract
citizens in the public one. This tolerant-sounding definition quietly elevates modern
Christian believers into the center of Europe and shuffles Muslim believers into a minority
unlike other minorities.
I would add that, for secularists, religion is safely relegated to the private realm only
because secularists also contend that there is an independent way of reaching authoritative
public agreements without recourse to the diverse religious faiths of citizens. The problem
is that different secular sects nominate different instruments to fill this role, and each
instrument diverges significantly from the others on what that authoritative practice is or
could be. Some place their faith in the dictates of public reason, others in deliberative
consensus, others in transparent procedures, others in implicit contractual agreements,
and others in a ‘‘myth’’ of equality citizens acceptas ifit were ontologically grounded.
None of these images of public life folds the reflexivity needed into faith-practices them-
selves. They do not, in my view, because they pretend to identifya forum above faith
through which to regulate diverse faiths.If the nobility of secularism resides in its quest to
enable multiple faiths to co-exist on the same territory, its shallowness resides in the
hubris of its distinction between private faith and public reason.
Embedded Faith and Relational Diversity
If Asad clarifies an element in the double minoritization of Muslims in Europe and
America, he also speaks to many orthodox Catholics, Jews, evangelical Protestants, and
obdurate atheists. Taken together, these minorities may make up a majority of minorities
in several countries.^26 Many of them feel that the privatization of religion and the corollary
reduction of faith to a pile of epistemic beliefs has minoritized them in a double way too,
if not as radically. Thus the issue posed with reference to Muslims in Europe is important
to Muslims, to other faith-practices, and to the larger question of how to forge a robust,
pluralist ethos of engagement out of multiple minorities of religious being.
What, from the point of view of secularism, does it take to ‘‘de-essentialize’’ faith? In
the case of John Rawls, for instance, it seems to involve three things: first, to subtract
from each creed the demand that it provide the authoritative center around which state
politics rotates; second, to disconnect belief (but not its symbolic expression) from devout
enactments and ritual performances; third, to reach consensus on a discourse of public
justice that rises above the diversity of private faiths while being compatible with most.^27
The doctrine of embedded pluralism I embrace concurs with Rawlsian secularism in ask-
ing advocates of each faith-practice, including Christianity, to give up the first demand,
doing so because this is the minimal concession each must make to foster common gover-
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