Hesitant Secularists: The Politics of Secularism and Post-Secularism in 21st Century Portugal

How secular is Portugal? Is it a post-catholic polity, transitioning from monoconfessionality to religious pluralism? Is it, in that sense, a post-secular polity? Recent events suggest that post-secularity might underpin a specific mode of governance to a larger and deeper extent than previously thought. Research on the religious field in Portugal has been dominated by Church-centric frameworks, eschewing Bordieusian field theory in its richness; moreover, that research stream has rarely taken steps towards a keener understanding of intersections between religion, religious traditions and public policy. As a consequence, debates on the categories of secular, secularism and secularity are limited to discussions on crude distinctions between the separation of private and public spheres, without regard for contemporary discussions on varieties of secularism, the emergence of post-secularism as a descriptive term as well as a mode of governance, and the redeployment of religion into a richer societal landscape where, as Charles Taylor states, it is one among many options in the collective knowledge and meaningmaking pool. This is quite clear in Portugal, where the religious field has faced significant reconfigurations since the early 1990s. Moreover, corporatist modes of intermediation bring secularism to the fore as a relevant conceptual tool to scholars envisioning the emergence of new formations of the secular in polities where the usual tropes of secularization theory were hardly ever applicable. The Portuguese polity is an interesting test-case in this regard, as its regulatory environment regarding religion has evolved largely according to governance procedures that have at their core normative visions of what is secular, non-secular and perhaps post-secular. The interplay between these categories in a largely unknown conceptual territory and empirical context is thus the object of this paper.