Germany and the New Global History of Secularism: Questioning the Postcolonial Genealogy

Secularism has emerged as a central category of twenty-first century political thought that in many ways has replaced the theory of secularization. According to postcolonial scholars, neither the theory nor the practice of secularization was politically neutral. They define secularism as the set of discourses, policies, and constitutional arrangements whereby modern states and liberal elites have sought to unify nations and divide colonial populations. This definition is quite different from the original meaning of secularism, as an immanent scientific worldview linked to anticlericalism. Anthropologist Talal Asad has connected nineteenth-century worldview secularism to twenty-first century political secularism through a genealogical account that stresses continuities of liberal hegemony. This essay challenges this account. It argues that liberal elites did not merely subsume worldview secularism in their drive for state secularization. Using the tools of conceptual history, the essay shows that one reason that “secularization” only achieved its contemporary meaning in Germany after 1945 was that radical freethinkers and other anticlerical secularists had previously resisted liberal hegemony. The essay concludes by offering an agenda for research into the discontinuous history of these two types of secularism.

In the course of writing a book on nineteenth-century German rationalist dissent, Freethought, and atheism, I found the new literature on secularism extremely useful and stimulating. 4 But I soon realized that my informants could not be easily enclosed in the history of secularism-cum-secularization told by postcolonial scholars. To begin with, I was confronted by the fact that there are two definitions of secularism. The term was coined in 1851 as a self-appellation by British freethinkers to clarify their essential aims. It tied advocacy of immanent worldview and ethics to anticlerical critique. This contrasts with the definition just outlined, which emerged in the early 1960s to describe the religious policies, not of Western Europe and the United States, but rather of countries, specifically Turkey and India, where separation was linked to modernizing ideologies of the state. 5 If it were merely a problem of definition, one could separate these phenomena by naming one worldview secularism and the other political or governmental secularism. However, their histories were intertwined. The liberal elites who backed secularization shared with more plebian freethinkers assumptions about the cultural relevance of natural science, the emancipation of religious minorities, and the need to limit church control of public education. At the same time, they were competitors, who clashed over political practices and epistemological assumptions. The theorists of political secularism have tended to overlook these clashes and subsume worldview secularism under the liberal project of secularization. In the process, they have given their usage of the term "secularism" a pedigree that goes back to 1851. In this essay, I question this genealogy by returning to the history of the struggle for definitional control of the terms "secularization" and "secularism" fought between freethinkers, liberals, and conservative Christians in Britain and Germany.

SECULARISMS: PLURAL AND SINGULAR
Awareness of the rival definitions brought me to what I see as the Archimedean point-and key methodological dilemma-of the postcolonial literature on political secularism. On the one hand, its authors eschew any teleological claims, and present themselves as advocates of the subaltern, the fragmentary, the irreducible. On the other, they make constant recourse to secularism in the singular and repeatedly employ a cast of hegemonic agents, who are understood to be ultimately driving secularism, in terms of class: the bourgeoisie, in terms of ideology: liberalism, in terms of institutions: the centralized, bureaucratic nation-state.
Scholars of secularism resolve the tension between the particular and the universal in different ways. Social theorist Ashis Nandy argued in 1990 that the mounting religious conflicts in India revealed that political secularism was a colossus with feet of clay. Underneath . 5 A link between the two definitions of secularism is found in the incorporation of the French term laïcité (laiklik) in the Turkish constitution of 1923. Laïcité fused the Republican cultural projects of anticlericalism, positivism, and state secularization. It was enshrined in the French separation law of 1905, which became an international model for reformers. a thin crust of Westernized state elites, who had inherited an antireligious orientation from the colonial regime, most Indian politicians only paid lip service to Western norms, while promoting more pluralist and more authentically Indian understandings of the public role of religion. 6 By and large, the critical scholarship has not taken Nandy's lead and baldly dismissed secularism as a false ideology designed in the West and ill-fitted for Indian society. Instead, they have investigated secularism in practices and discourses produced at discrete sites across the face of global modernity, where elites and governments faced the challenges posed by religious communities to the emergent national and imperial states. 7 In the pivotal text of the new literature, Formations of the Secular, anthropologist Talal Asad proposes that scholars employ Michel Foucault's genealogical method, whereby major aspects of modernity, such as secularism, are traced back to earlier micropolitical scenarios, from which they were liberated and made use of in other, larger arenas. He names secularism an "embedded concept" of humble origins, which began in the "[l]ong-standing habits of indifference, disbelief, or hostility among individuals towards Christian rituals and authorities" but which became "entangled with projects of total social reconstruction by means of legislation." 8 The invention of the term "secularism" in 1851 by George Holyoake, the leader of British Freethought, serves Asad as a case in point. It marks the moment at which the anticlericalism of marginal groups of subaltern radicals and Owenite socialists was transformed and passed to the more powerful social forces of British liberalism. The larger context for this shift, according to Asad, is the emergence of the modern nation-state with its bureaucratic regimes of managing the population, which Foucault designated as governmentality.
Thus, from multiple origins, secularism took on a more singular character as it became a core doctrine of liberalism and practice of the state. Asad reintroduces the difference between the universal and plural in his subsequent distinction between secularism, as a "political and governmental doctrine that has its origin in nineteenth-century liberal society" and "the secular" as a "concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life," but for which there existed no "single line of filiation." 9 The challenge, according to the editors of a recent volume, is to place "plural secularisms" "in relation to the overarching narrative that gives them both political authority 6 Ashis Nandy, "The Politics of Secularism Ibid., 25. and affective power." 10 More concretely, anthropologist Peter van der Veer invites us to examine how supposedly Western ideas of "rationality and progress were [ . . . ] produced and universally spread in the expansion of European power" but "inserted in different historical trajectories" in places such as India and China. Focusing on the state and elite groups, van der Veer emphasizes continuities in Chinese state secularism from the Imperial to the Maoist period and compares this to the secularism of similarly hegemonic groups in India. 11 While I admire these studies, I take issue with the underlying narrative produced by the assumption that national and imperial projects of secularization were consolidated by 1850 and extended globally thereafter under the auspices of liberalism and the modern state. Despite insistence on local variation, this narrative places the history of secularism within a linear process of continual adjustment without serious reversal. Much of the literature draws its examples from the British Empire, and many of its authors work in North American universities, two settings, where, arguably, liberalism has remained the dominant political system since the nineteenth century.
In short, even if they investigate micro-political developments, the histories of secularism tend to be universal histories. To the degree that they consider worldview secularism, these histories incorporate it as a factor in the elaboration of a larger and essentially singular project of emergent secularity. The same applies to a provocative work inspired by Taylor's A Secular Age, John Lardas Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America, which places worldview atheism alongside Protestant evangelicalism, spiritualism, and phrenology, as one of the myriad religious experiments that emerged in a dialectical relationship to a rising secular order. 12 This essay argues, by contrast, that the history of worldview secularism problematizes the assumptions made in the new universal histories of the secular. Employing the tools of conceptual history, which holds that words themselves bear the traces of social, religious, and intellectual struggles, I will examine the relation of worldview secularists and their interlocutors as revealed through the history of the term "secularism" and its cognate concepts. I begin by returning to the coining of the term "secularism" in 1851 and asking whether the neologism added semantic grist to the liberals' mill, as Asad suggested, or whether it was not also throwing a wrench into the works. The essay then turns to Germany to explore how competition between worldview secularism and political secularism was reflected in the emergence of early sociological theories of secularization around 1900. It asks why the liberal theory of secularization did not gain widespread acceptance and why the terms "secular," "secularism," and "secularization" achieved their contemporary meanings in Germany only after 1945. The answers to these questions provide a vantage point from which to critically rethink the universal history of political secularism.

THE EMERGENCE OF SECULARISM IN BRITAIN IN THE 1840S AND 1850S
In a recent publication, the prominent sociologist of religion Bryan Turner argues that the "ideas of a 'secular' society" grew out of Holyoake's secularist movement. 13 Yet a look at the 1840s reveals that-at least on the level of terminology-the opposite appears to be true: "secularism" emerged from "the secular." The adjective "secular" had been widely used in the early nineteenth century to differentiate parish from ecclesiastical and monastic clergy, or profane from religious music. The binary "secular and religious" became politicized in the 1840s in the context of a debate over national primary education. A government plan to give the established Church of England privileged influence over a compulsory school system elicited protests from Protestant dissenters in 1843, which, in turn, provided an opening for advocates of secular education. In a July 1843 speech in the House of Commons, one MP argued that Britain should follow the example of several American states and Holland and make the schools secular and nondenominational, allowing, however, the various churches to delegate ministers for religious instruction. Such national education would help "in counteracting an insurrectionary spirit" and "putting an end to the Welsh and Gaelic languages." 14 Striking a similar tone, a pamphlet of that year argued that secular education would aid in the moral disciplining of the "lower orders." These claims demonstrate that, like earlier arguments in favor Catholic and Jewish emancipation, liberal calls for nondenominational education emerged out of concern over national unity in a competitive international and colonial context. 15 The debates over school secularization were not devoid of worldview secularism. Many assumed that secular education based in science was not only fairer than religious education but also superior to it. Anticlericals, including George Combe, Britain's most famous phrenologist, began to promote their own worldviews in the name of nondenominational, scientific education. The workers' education movement, which formed a center of Freethought, aligned itself with school reform, and a Secular Education League was founded in London in 1847 in the Gould Square Mechanics' Institute. The Owenite radical and chief spokesman of British Freethought, George Holyoake, signaled his interest in the term by 12 THE GERMANIC REVIEW VOLUME 90, NUMBER 1 / 2015 subtitling The Reasoner a "Secular and Eclectic journal' in March 1849. 16 A clear sign of the impact freethinkers were having on the meaning of "secular" came in 1850, when a leading liberal, Richard Cobden, addressed a congress convened to found a National Secular School Association. He rejected this proposed name because, to his ear, "secular" meant "not religious" rather than "non-sectarian." If school reformers associated their cause with irreligion, Cobden warned that they would be "opening up a chink in their armour which they would some day have rivet up with more difficulty and discussion." 17 The delegates were apparently convinced and chose the name National Public School Association instead.
Holyoake claimed the term for Freethought when he founded the Central Secular Society in 1852. The year before he had defined "secularism" as "a development of freethinking, including its positive as well as its negative side. Secularists consider freethinking as a double protest-a protest against specific speculative error, and in favour of specific moral truth." According to Asad, the strategic benefit of "secularism" over the more exclusive and harsh term "atheism" was to position the freethinkers to "direct an emerging mass politics of social reform in a rapidly industrializing society." A statement made by a leading Unitarian intellectual of the day, Harriet Martineau, corroborates this interpretation. "[T]he term Secularism" she wrote approvingly in 1853, had the advantage of "including a large number of persons who are not atheists and uniting them for action" as well as getting rid of "a vast amount of prejudice." 18 Thus we see that the neologism "secularism" did not produce the secular; rather, it appeared within the field of meanings opened up by the politics of secular education. Holyoake appropriated the term secular to bring Freethought closer to his desired allies in the movement for secular schools, such as working-class Christian dissenters and middleclass liberals. By shunting off primitive atheism and declining to enter a contest for absolute truth in the religious realm, Holyoake positioned secularism to appear not as a denial of Christianity but as a competing creed. As yet another dissenting sect, secularism could petition for inclusion in the rights and privileges owed to all religious societies, including the right to provided religious (or ethical) instruction in public schools. At the same time, however, the semantic overlap with the secular claimed for secularism a privileged position as the only "religious" creed compatible with the secular content of scientific education.
Holyoake was attacked by opponents on the right and the left for hiding his atheism in "the secular." One Protestant minister called him a rattlesnake that had discarded his rattle 16  but was no less venomous. 19 However, this move had another cost: Holyoake's semantic distinctions were difficult to maintain. Late in the century, he protested that his term "secularism" was being usurped and confused with secularity: Things secular are as separate from the Church as land from the ocean. And what nobody seems to discern is that things secular are in themselves quite different from Secularism. The secular is a mode of instruction; Secularism is a code of conduct. [ . . . ] Secularist teaching would [conflict with theology], but secular instruction would not. 20 Holyoake inserted "mode" and "code" to shore up the distinction between political secularization and worldview secularism. 21 Holyoake's frustration at the failure of the public to uphold this distinction is instructive. On the one hand, it supports Asad's implicit claim that worldview secularism had become subordinated to liberal dominance and political secularization. On the other, it indicates that secularists continued to resist this subordination. In order to demonstrate how this secularist resistance could in turn shape-and even deform-liberalism, I turn now to the German case.

LIBERALS AND SECULARISTS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY
By treating worldview secularists and advocates of state secularization as two distinct groups with different social and political characteristics-the former being more lower-class and politically radical, the latter being more middle-class and liberal-I am running roughshod over numerous gray areas. There were, of course, wealthy, reactionary advocates of a monistic conception of the universe, just as there were radical socialists who defended Christianity. I employ these two groups as ideal types that allow me to make an intervention into a critical literature that tends to focus only on one, namely liberals. These ideal types are also useful for making comparisons between the British and German experiences of secularism and secularization, which increasingly diverged after 1870. Until then, the relationship between worldview secularists and liberals had been relatively harmonious in both Britain and Central Europe. Liberals justified state secularization by championing the rights of secularists and other religious minorities, and, in both regions, leading liberals supported popular scientific education as means to inculcate liberal values in the lower-middle and working classes. But whereas British liberalism was able to bridge the social gap between these groups, with the rise of socialism in the 1870s, German liberalism was not. This rift colored relations between established German intellectuals and organized secularists. Major figures of German science, such as Emil Du Bois-Reymond and Rudolf Virchow, sought to disentangle science from secularist worldview. Virchow, who only four years earlier had announced his support for a Kulturkampf , a "culture war" against Catholicism in the Prussian Diet, struck a defensive tone in a famous speech of 1877, in which he urged fellow liberals to imagine "how the theory of evolution appears in the head of a socialist." 22 Over the next half-century, the chief organizations of German secularism-Freethought and Free Religion-became increasingly identified with socialism, often to the chagrin of their middle-class leaderships. In October 1912, a prominent liberal politician was pleased to report the absence of any party colleagues at the meeting of the International Federation of Freethinkers in Munich, which "some time ago, would have been visited overwhelmingly by those who belong to political liberalism." Having been overcome in "the leading intellectual stratum," secularist ideas "today find their last echoes in the lower strata of the nation." 23 The conflict between radical secularists and liberal secularizers has not featured in recent studies of religious conflict in nineteenth-century Germany. These have centered on the Kulturkampf of the 1870s and have generally employed binary models to portray the conflict as a manifestation of the confessional antagonism between Protestantism and Catholicism 24 or as a clash between liberalism with its conception of state secularity and Roman Catholicism with its vision of a Christian order. 25 Although the historians of the Kulturkampf are only beginning to receive postcolonial studies, they operate from a similar model of religious-secular conflict. Both identify policies of secularization as tools of Protestant liberals aiming at cultural hegemony, and both place the emergence of the theory of secularization with the history of that struggle. Several historians of Germany now argue that Weber's theory of secularization should be interpreted as a partisan contribution to the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf in which he, as a Protestant liberal, was raised. 26 Developments at the height of the Kulturkampf support the claim that anti-Catholic struggle pushed liberals to formulate broader projects of societal declericalization. The 1874 New Year's editorial of one of the most influential liberal papers, the Berlin Nationalzeitung, predicted that the coming year would realize "[w]hat we have hoped for so long [ . . . ] We will be able to live and die as citizens outside the shadows of the church." 27 Yet I would argue that worldview secularism disrupts the binaries with which the new histories of the Kulturkampf have been written. There had been relative harmony between radical secularists and their liberal allies at the outset of the Kulturkampf in 1871, but this gave way to the discord marked by Virchow's speech of 1877. In 1878, when liberal anticlericalism had largely fallen silent, Social Democratic anticlerical Johann Most created a furor when he launched a campaign for church-exiting (Kirchenaustritt) among working-class Protestant Berliners. It was at this point that leading liberal voices, such as historian Heinrich von Treitschke, suddenly rediscovered the Christian essence of the German nation and fused antisecularism with antisemitism and antisocialism to arrive at his influential vision of integral nationalism. Such developments require us to revise the bi-confessional model of nineteenth-century German religious politics and go beyond a tri-confessional one including Judaism to arrive at a quadriconfessional model including secularism. 28 How does the quadriconfessional understanding of religious conflict contribute to our history of concepts? What if, instead of expressing liberal Protestant triumphalism, the first formulations of the secularization theory by sociologists Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies also contained signs of a strategic retreat? Half a century ago, the political philosopher Hermann Lübbe proposed that as these liberal sociologists plucked the term "secularization" out of the arsenal of political anticlericalism and transformed it into a social scientific 16 THE GERMANIC REVIEW VOLUME 90, NUMBER 1 / 2015 term to describe an impersonal, macrohistorical process, they had effectively "neutralized" secularism. 29 Lübbe has been criticized for misrepresenting those few instances where the terms "Säkularisierung" or "Säkularismus" were actually used in the German debate. 30 However, I think that his instinct is correct. The neutralization mechanism is revealed not in liberal responses to these terms, but rather in their responses to the secularist project itself. A clear example is offered by Tönnies's programmatic speech given at the founding meeting of the German Society for Ethical Culture in 1892. At the meeting, the founders-liberal professors, urban aristocrats, and businessmen-were confronted by leading German secularists, including the biologist and monist Ernst Haeckel, who had turned out to demand that a secular ethics necessarily wage a struggle against the churches and support their worldview. Opposing this view, Tönnies argued that a science of ethics based on the comparative analysis of the moral content of different religions offered a more effective strategy for ending the religious conflicts of the era. This science of ethics created a perspective above the religions that could synthesize them on a higher order, rather than calling on one to submit to the other. Importantly, Tönnies subjected the worldviews of Darwinian-inspired natural scientific secularism and Marxism to the same critique as the churches by treating them as objects of ethical analysis. The appeal of Ethical Culture to freethinking liberals is clear. It offered a path to national (or for liberal cosmopolitans such as Tönnies a transnational) spiritual unity without abandoning their respective confessions. At the same time it defanged radical secularism by relegating it to one (underreflected) religious source among many. 31 The science of ethics was able to secularize secularism, but at a cost to liberals. They had to abandon the dream of a unified worldview grounded in natural science. Some two decades later, philosopher Heinrich Rickert and sociologist Max Weber formalized this neutralization of secularism, when they argued that worldviews constituted systems of thought based on value and not on empirical truth. 32 The essential point here is that early, canonical statements of the sociological theory of secularization emerged not at the highpoint of the Kulturkampf , when many German liberals understood themselves to be locked in a binary struggle between scientific modernity and recidivist religious traditionalism, but rather at the point at which this binary began to break down. Radical secularism, aligned politically to socialism, ruptured the loose harmony of political and worldview secularism and contributed to the ongoing fracturing of the earlier liberal consensus on religious progress. Thus while some liberals remained true to positivist worldview and with monist Ernst Haeckel called out "impavidi progrediamur!" [we must proceed without fear], others argued for a division of science and politics from ultimate questions, while still others embraced anti-materialism and anti-Semitism. 33 SECULARIZATION, SECULARISM, AND CHRISTIANITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY Whereas Tönnies criticized monist worldview out of his own secular commitment, Weber did so out of an affinity with cultural Protestantism. One of his chief innovations, as set out in the Protestant Ethic, was to locate the driving force of secularization not in worldview secularism but rather in the history of religion itself. Weber's disentanglement of secularization and secularism was echoed in the work of theologian Ernst Troeltsch. Yet, despite these efforts, the leading Christian thinkers in Germany, Protestant and Catholic alike, largely rejected the term "secularization," because, according to Lübbe, it contained "too much polemic of its freethinking origin." 34 The terms "Säkularismus" and "Säkularisierung" were popularized in Germany only in the late Weimar republic, in part by Protestant ministers, who had returned from the 1928 Jerusalem conference of the International Missionary Council impressed with the keynote speech delivered by the Quaker Rufus Jones on "Secular Civilization and the Christian Task." Rufus argued that a turning point had been reached by Western civilization and that instead of being the hub from which Christianity was exported into the heathen world, the West was now threatened by heathens in its European core. German theologians translated Rufus's terminology and defined "Säkularismus" as the collectivity of "all forces opposing the faith." It was, according to missionary Siegfried Knak, the "worldview and attitude" behind the "commerce, politics, industry and technology" of the day. Crucially, this definition of secularism conflated radical Freethought and communism with the secularization of modern civilization. 35 The theory that secularization was a pathology caused by secularism was articulated in the concept of "Kulturbolschewismus" then being advanced by Catholic and Protestant theologians and politicians. Christian advocates of authoritarianism found "cultural Bolshevism" congenial, because it connected the bogey of Soviet communism to socialism and liberalism by pointing to a common secularist root. Karl Hutten, a Protestant minister, called communism "not only a political movement-in our German Bolshevism that is perhaps not even the essential matter-rather it is a spiritual orientation (Gesinnung)." This "worldview of radical immanence (Diesseitigkeit) and godlessness" has its origin "above all in fallen liberalism. There is almost a straight line between ruined liberalism and Bolshevik cultural revolution." 36 A similar argument was made in the May 1931 papal encyclical "Quadragesimo anno," which called on Catholics to "remember that Liberalism is the father of this Socialism that is pervading morality and culture and that Bolshevism will be its heir." 37 Weber and Troeltsch's distinction between secularization and secularism could not catch hold in Germany prior to 1933, because, I would argue, liberals and conservatives proved unable to neutralize worldview secularism politically. It was only after the war that the prominent German theologian Friedrich Gogarten arrived at a new position that distinguished between a healthy secularization compatible with modern Protestantism and a secularism that resulted from the irrational apotheosis of the secular. Secularization, he wrote, was "the necessary and legitimate consequence of Christian faith," while secularism was a "perversion (Entartung) of secularization." Already in 1950, another Protestant theologian, Friedrich Karl Schumann, had ascribed to secularism the status of a theological-philosophical error, "a misunderstanding of the genuine Christian differentiation of 'spiritual' and 'worldly' produced within the Christian domain." 38 Numerous social, political, and religious transformations would have to be considered to account for this revaluation and acceptance of secularization in the period after 1945. The transformations began already in 1933 when the Nazi regime fundamentally reorganized confessional politics by eliminating Freethought and communism and by ghettoizing Germany's Jews. One Protestant theologian had proclaimed the "end of secularism" already in 1935. 39 Following the elimination of National Socialism, which many Christians had come to see as another variation of secularism, politics became more consensual and centrist in postwar West Germany. Many Protestant churchmen, among them Gogarten himself, were happy to forget their own experimentation with völkisch theology and Christian worldview during years prior to 1945. 40 The destruction of the German state, the lessening of confessional tensions through the founding of the Christian Democratic Union as an ecumenical party, and the spirit of anticommunism all led to the elimination of the quadriconfessional field in West Germany. In East Germany, secularism became an element of state educational and religious policy.

CONCLUSIONS
The conceptual history of "secularism" and "secularization" indicates that worldview secularism should not be prematurely subsumed under the liberal political drive for state secularization. Liberals did not merely assimilate the useful tools provided by worldview secularists-they actively combated secularism. Richard Cobden in 1850, Rudolf Virchow in 1877, Ferdinand Tönnies in 1892, and Max Weber after 1900 sought to neutralize secularism at the same time that they sought to tame religion. Yet, at least in Germany, this neutralization was not entirely successful. When the terms "secularism" and "secularization" finally entered German public debates around 1930, they were used largely as synonyms. Only with the collapse of the confessional system and the banning of secularism as an important and divisive component of domestic politics did German church leaders finally accept secularization as a legitimate process within Christian history.
Although I find strong divergences between the German and the British or American experiences of secularization, I am not breaking a lance for the return of the Sonderweg interpretation to German history. Rather, I see elements of the German experience, in particular the clash between politically powerful, hegemonic religions and radical secularism allied to the political Left, as typical for many regions across the globe. This conclusion suggests a number of points in an agenda for research that might correct the framework with which scholars are currently addressing the global history of secularism(s).
1. The histories of political secularism and worldview secularism should be brought together, but in a fashion that acknowledges the gulf between their respective definitions and agents. 41 This means, on the one hand, identifying, as van der Veer has, the ways in which radical secularists worked through forms of secularization developed in the nineteenth century by liberals. At the same time, however, one should question the assumption that state secularization was a singular, global process with local variations. Here I would agree with Hugh McLeod, when he argues that "[r]ather than seeing secularisation as an impersonal 'process' [ . . . ] it would be better to see this as a 'contest,' in which adherents of rival world-views battled it out." 42 2. With an eye to the deep transnational conflicts over religion that occurred between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, one should rethink the continuities suggested by much of the current research. Rather than seeing the evolution of secularity as an essentially unbroken line connecting the high point of classical European liberalism to the neoliberal present, the German example indicates a discontinuous history. Such discontinuity can be investigated through comparative semantic histories of terms such as "secularism" or "worldview." 3. The periodization provided by the studies of political secularism needs correction. I would posit an "age of secularism" or "age of worldviews" in the century between the 1840s and roughly 1949. I would further divide this into two periods in which the "culture wars" took different forms. In the first period, lasting roughly until the 41 Jacques Berlinerblau recently called for a greater dialogue between scholars of worldview secularism and postcolonial theorists of political secularism. However, his attack on the latter for its "obscurantism" and alleged political tendency reads like an anti-postmodernist throwback to the culture wars of the 1980s. As such, it is likely to forestall rather than increase critical dialogue. Jacques Berlinerblau, "The Crisis in Secular Studies," Chronicle of Higher First World War, the culture war was dominated by liberals and the major target was the Catholic Church. In the second period, beginning with the revolutions in Mexico, Russia, and Central Europe, there were greater levels of real and symbolic violence, and the target was all established churches and, in many cases, organized religion as a whole. This second culture war was not driven principally by liberals in alliance with the modern state (though this did occur in Mexico) but rather by a revolutionary Left acting from within the state (USSR and Spain) or as anti-state actors (Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, India, China

FUNDING
The author gratefully acknowledges the fellowship support provided by the AHRC and the Leverhulme Trust.