Interview with Cécile Laborde on Religion, Secularism, and Political Theory

Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview.It is part of the Special Issue on "Religion and Democratic Theory" that I am co-editing with Iman Al Nassre for Democratic Theory, and I am excited to talk to you about your current research.You have recently finished a first draft of a new book on secularism, for the Cambridge Elements series.Could you say a bit more about the idea of this book?Ccile Laborde: Thank you very much, it's nice to speak to you too.It's a very short book in which I try to defend the theory of "minimal secularism" more systematically.I have introduced it in my last book, Liberalism's Religion, in Chapter 4, but it raises a whole set of issues.I've had quite a lot of discussions with critics when Liberalism's Religion came out, and I try to strengthen this theory at various points.That's a kind of a clearing-up exercise.I also try to locate the idea of minimal secularism a bit better within the literature.On the one hand, there is a group of important scholars in various disciplines, including for example Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, or Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, who have challenged secularism, not necessarily for its content, but for its epistemic, sociological, anthropological, and historical assumptions, and particularly what kind of picture of religion it was implicitly working with.So that's one school I engage with.On the other hand, I try to show that there is a reasonable response to that school already in the literature, which is broadly the school of liberal neutrality, including for example John Rawls,