In his most recent contribution to The Immanent Frame, “Waiting for Godot, who is either late or not coming at all“, Vincent Pecora provides a provocative response to posts by Alex Hernandez and Justin Reynolds, which question, criticize and reflect on Pecora’s distinction between “secularism” and “secularization” (and particularly his statement that “ ‘secularization’ is a conceptual improvement over ‘secularism’ ”):
I am not a believer in any religious faith, but I recognize full well that I live my life in a world saturated with vestiges of religious faith and ritual from the past, and routine re-assertions of such faith and ritual in the present (as Sarah Shortall’s recent post also observed). I cannot imagine that my life, even as an unbeliever, would necessarily be emotionally richer or happier if all of this, including all the historical and cultural consequences of it, were suddenly wiped away. . . . It is not necessarily that I think we must have religion to survive—we may not need it at all. It is simply that I see no redemptive achievement—no telos worth pursuing—in its eradication.
By exploring the relationships between “secularization” and eschatology, secularism and “governmentality,” and transcendence and semantics, Pecora puts forward a thoughtful argument in the on-going debate.