Secular iconoclasm: purifying, privatizing, and profaning public faith

摘要

Secularists tend not to destroy religious icons, but to displace them. This, too, is a form of iconoclasm. By excluding certain symbols from public places, they treat them as idols—threats to the freedom of rational, rights-bearing citizens and thus to the sacred spaces of the democratic nation-state. In so doing, they inscribe these supposedly neutral spaces with specific cultural and religious norms. Yet contrary to increasingly popular arguments on both the right and left, these norms vary greatly from place to place, audience to audience, actor to actor. This variety makes it difficult if not impossible to speak of a coherent secular spatiality, let alone a coherent secular subject. In the USA, iconoclastic performances produce secular places in great variety, some hostile to religion, others to religious nationalism, and others to the state. Focusing on legal conflicts over state-sponsored religious speech, this article aims to problematize the notion of 'secular normativity' by analyzing some of this geographical diversity.