Plurality of the Secular: Uncovering African Forms of Secularity

Abstract

The article argues that existing conceptualizations of secularity ought to be expanded to embrace a plurality of practices and forms of life within African societies. In other words, secularity must be understood as a plurality of historically situated forms of life rather than a single Western conceptual template. Two interconnected objectives define the article. The first is to show shows how the concepts of “deprivatization,” “conditions of belief,” and “postsecularity,” drawn from José Casanova, Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas respectively, may contribute to a pluralistic conception of secularity. The second is to furnish concrete instances of secular forms of life in African societies by exploring the Igbo socio-religious world, underlining its secularity. In foregrounding African forms of secularity, the article not only challenges Western hegemonic appropriation of the secular category and its implicit race-religion nexus, but also contributes to ongoing efforts to rethink, ‘decolonize,’ and deracialize secularity as a global category of social analysis. Ultimately, the future of secularity lies in ongoing, decentered contestations and conversations across multiple worlds.

1. Introduction

At least one fact is discernible from much of the vast literature on secularity and postsecularity, namely, that secularity cannot be reduced to Western instantiations of it. If we think less of ‘secularism,’ an active ideological advocacy for separating religion from public institutions and government, it becomes easier to conceive secularity (different from the ideologically-laden ‘secularism’) as intrinsically plural, manifesting in different forms in different cultural contexts.

This article operates with a basic idea of secularity that may simply refer to societal order or forms of life not subordinated to religious dictates, although different kinds of beliefs or faith expressions may be available. Provided that the idea of secularity is not reductively limited to any single element, this article highlights such features as the privileging of reason, a culture of critique and contestation, a plurality of beliefs and viewpoints, the right of dissent, freedom to believe or not believe, heterodoxy, humanistic and immanent ideals, functional differentiation of spheres of society, and the freedom to challenge and undermine ‘divine’ authority or the assertion of human agency. These elements may be present in varying configurations and proportions. Interacting among themselves, these features serve to mediate the balance between the sacred and the profane, the divine and the human in the making of secularity. If we operate with this broad vision of the secular, any society, irrespective of race, color, and geo-political location, with requisite features for negotiating and balancing sacred and profane tendencies to secure social order and overall societal wellbeing may be rightly recognized as secular.

In this article, the plurality of the secular will be theorized not as a question of semantics but indeed as a question of forms of life. I do not focus on mapping the semantic terrain of the term, as some scholars have tried to do (see Casanova 1994, pp. 12–17), but on showing how secularity designates forms of life, expressed and enacted in varied cultural contexts, including non-Western societies. In addition, I do not merely critique Western hegemonic appropriation of the secular category and its implicit race-religion nexus, which is now receiving robust theorization in Anya Topolski’s “race-religion constellation” project (Topolski 2022, 2023), but I also provide a concrete example of a secular social order from Africa, a context typically excluded from the sphere of the secular.

Therefore, two mutually reinforcing objectives of this essay come to the fore: The first is to show how the concepts of “deprivatization,” “conditions of belief,” and “postsecularity,’ drawn from José Casanova, Charles Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas respectively, already contain elements of a plural conception of secularity. I argue that, while each of these thinkers may have been pursuing wider theoretical objectives not primarily linked to arguing for the plurality of secularity, their thoughts on “deprivatization,” “conditions of belief,” and “postsecularity” respectively could nevertheless be useful for building a case for a plural conception of secularity. The second objective is to philosophically explore the Igbo socio-religious world, underlining its secularity.

Discussions and arguments in this article make it possible to see that, while the West may have a legitimate claim to a historical instantiation of secularity and may have richly contributed to the meaning of the secular (cf. Gauchet 1997; Taylor 2007), other forms of secularity have emerged—and will continue to emerge—from different parts of the world. This fact not only helps expand the horizon of the secular and de-centers its meaning but also legitimizes the provocative question famously raised by Mahmood (2010): “Can secularism be Other-wise?” (note that Mahmood does not distinguish “secularism” from “secularity”). Similarly, Asad (2003, p. 17) suggests that our curiosity be directed to the practice of secularity “regardless of where they have originated.”

This study forms part of wider discourses on the “race-religion” framework steered by Topolski (2022, 2023), “multiple secularities” (Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt 2011, 2015), and “global secularity” which explore varieties of secular forms of life (Duschka et al. 2024; Zemmin et al. 2024). However, its significance lies in the fact that it takes these discussions a step further by actually exploring secular forms of life in the Igbo context. Similarly, the ideas advanced in this work may contribute to the conversation on secularity in Africa (Abbink 2014; Engelke 2015; Igwe 2014), or even the nascent agenda of ‘decolonizing’ postsecularity (see Spini 2020). In light of the race-religion nexus in the shaping of secular taxonomies, the article invites us to understand secularity in new ways that rupture racial and ideological strictures. Finally, analyzing secularity in the Igbo context makes the point that the secular framework remains pertinent and beneficial—and this indeed serves as a counterpoint to scholarly standpoints, as found in Abdurrahman (2021), Asad (2003), Mahmood (2015), and Voegelin (1987), that manifest varying levels of suspicion towards the secular.

Some clarifications are necessary. First, with regard to method, the article is theoretical and interpretive; it is not an empirical study. As such, it draws on the texts of relevant thinkers, and does not base its claims on field work, interviews and opinion polls. Second, my primary motivation for drawing on the three concepts in Casanova, Taylor, and Habermas is not only because I see these concepts as useful resources for underscoring the plurality of the secular but also because they have not yet been explored in the literature for this purpose. In other words, it is auspicious to go back to these original thinkers because there is as yet no work in the literature that has shown how their ideas of deprivatization, conditions of belief, and postsecularity contribute to a more expansive conception of secularity that may embrace African forms of life. Third, when it comes to the Igbo context, I rely on depictions of precolonial Igbo society found in the works of Chinua Achebe, as well as other reputable scholarship on Igbo life and society. I acknowledge that, like all societies, the Igbo worldviews and imaginaries depicted in these writings undergo transformations—and should not be construed as immutable. Yet a substantial degree of continuity renders them relevant to contemporary society and thus a legitimate subject of scholarly investigation.

The objectives of this article will be realized by three interwoven movements (apart from the introduction and conclusion) that simultaneously represent the structure of the article. In the Section 2, I lay the foundation by showing how the two pivotal ideas of “deprivatization” and “conditions of belief” in Casanova and Taylor respectively provide rich insights for a pluralistic conception of the secular. Section 3 builds on the argument initiated in the first section, paying particular attention to the notion of the “postsecular,” as theorized by Habermas. Here, I propose that postsecularity may be more properly understood as yet another register for expressing the plurality of the secular. Finally, in Section 4 I give a concrete and practical import to the case I established (in Section 2 and Section 3) for a pluralistic conception of the secular by exploring relevant Igbo socio-religious worldviews and practices, arguing that Igbo forms of life may rightly be called secular.

2. Deprivatization, Conditions of Belief, and the Plurality of the Secular

In this section, I argue that the concepts of “deprivatization” in Casanova and “conditions of belief” in Taylor furnish rich insights for expanding our conception of secularity. Before I proceed, I must acknowledge that the primary theoretical agendas of the two thinkers were not to argue for a pluralistic conception of the secular. Casanova sets out to show that religion has ‘gone public’ in our times, contrary to the postulations of secularization theorists, while Taylor aims to provide an elaborate account of the changed conditions of belief within Latin Christendom in the wake of modernity and its ramifications. In this study, however, the ideas of the two thinkers will serve to expand the concept of the secular and thus underline its plurality.

A proper way to understand the two concepts—and indeed the larger goals of the Casanova and Taylor—would be to see them as a counterpoint to secularization theories, which used to enjoy wide acceptance among ‘classical’ sociologists. Secularization theories may well be the bogeyman that Casanova, Taylor, and a host of other thinkers aimed to exorcise.

Secularization theories, though they come in different shades (Berger 1967; Weber 1978, 2004, 2005), postulate a progressive and inexorable disenchantment, conceived in terms of an overall decline in the power and significance that religion (the church, the supernatural, the magical, etc.) once held in society. This is explainable by the logic of modernization concomitant with the expansion of the horizon of rationality. Secularization theorists see secularization as inseparable from modernization, rationalization, and disenchantment. An important component of secularization is the notion of differentiation. This involves the separation of church and state—in other words, the liberation of the sphere of politics from its age-old religious foundations. In addition to politics, morality, economy, law, and various spheres and institutions of society gradually differentiate themselves, losing their sacred underpinnings. Religion thus retreats from the public, i.e., becomes “privatized.” Secularization theorists foresee a future in which religious adherents would survive only as a small, embattled minority resisting a juggernaut of secular culture.

Casanova’s refutation of secularization theories is nuanced. Rather than dismiss their entire claims offhandedly, he carefully dissects them into three components, pointing out what remains plausible and what should be jettisoned. Doing so “forces us to rethink and reformulate, but not necessarily to abandon uncritically, existing theories of secularization” (Casanova 1994, p. 7). Three components of secularization theories are distinguishable: secularization as differentiation, secularization as religion’s decline, and secularization as privatization. He thinks that the differentiation thesis is defensible, observable in the functional autonomy of legal, political, economic and scientific institutions. These spheres have been effectively uncoupled from ecclesiastical dictates and religious underpinnings, each following its internal dynamics and rationales—a condition markedly different from, say, medieval Europe. As for the decline thesis, Casanova thinks that it is debatable, compounded by the difficulty of circumscribing what constitutes ‘religion’ and the lack of statistically reliable method of determining both personal and collective commitments to religious practices and beliefs.

But Casanova fiercely contests the third component—the privatization thesis, insisting that religion has, on the contrary, “gone public.” The notion that religion has gone public might create an impression that it was ever private—and this makes the very concept of “deprivatization” seem like a misnomer. Nevertheless, Casanova sticks to this term. His explanation is that, contrary to the belief among secularization theorists that modernization will inevitably drive religion from the public sphere, there is overwhelming evidence of religion’s resurgent visibility in public discourse, social movements, and national and transnational politics in recent times. All this is encapsulated in the concept of “deprivatization,” an idea that represents his main thesis:

The central thesis of the present study is that we are witnessing the “deprivatization” of religion in the modern world. By deprivatization, I mean the fact that religious traditions throughout the world are refusing to accept the marginal and privatized which theories of modernity as well as theories of secularization had reserved for them… One of the results of this ongoing contestation is a dual, interrelated process of repoliticization of the private religious and moral spheres and the renormativization of the public economic and political spheres. This is what I call, for lack of a better term, the “deprivatization” of religion.

(Casanova 1994, pp. 5–6)

This passage is useful for our present purposes insofar as it furnishes many of the elements needed to theorize the plurality of the secular. I note here that religion’s refusal to accept relegation to “private” status has significant implications for how we theorize secularity.

For example, the concept of deprivatization effectively expands the horizon of the secular to embrace elements precluded by secularization theories. While secularization theories posit that the differentiation that goes with secularization effectively depoliticizes religion, assigning it little or no political role, the concept of deprivatization “repoliticizes” religion and recognizes its significance for politics. Contemporary societies demonstrate robust patterns of religion’s engagement in politics, law, and moral debate, often leading to real interpenetration between supposedly autonomous spheres.

Casanova does not deny that spheres of society—e.g., religion, politics, and economy—are functionally distinct. However, he rejects the notion that this functional distinction turns each sphere into silos, signaling religion’s loss of relevance in the political sphere. The fact that these distinct functional subsystems of society are no longer beholden to religion (as was the case in premodern times) does not preclude a robust interaction and interpenetration between religion and these other subsystems. Seen from this perspective—and for our present purposes—the concept of deprivatization gives a meaning to secularity that includes rather than excludes religious expressions. As I will show in Section 4, this expanded meaning of secularity that embraces religion is theoretically auspicious for recognizing secularity in African contexts precisely because African forms of secularity are not averse to religious expressions.

Casanova observes a “dual, interrelated process” of deprivatization, where, on the one hand, politics penetrates a supposedly private religious and moral sphere and, on the other hand, the religious and moral values impact supposedly public economic and political spheres. The interpenetration between different spheres of society blurs the line between the sacred and the profane, such that it ceases to be a “paradox” for a society to be “simultaneously religious and secular” (Casanova 1994, p. 38).

Conditions of Belief

Charles Taylor’s formulation of “conditions of belief” in secular modernity similarly serves to make a case for the diversification of the idea of secularity. Taylor identifies three dimensions of secularity: “secularity 1” as the separation of church and state, “secularity 2” as religious decline, and “secularity 3” as a transformation in the “conditions of belief” shaping how individuals and groups relate to religion in modernity.

Secularization theories—which Taylor frequently refers to as “subtraction theories”—provide a backdrop for understanding Taylor’s conception of secularity. “Subtraction theories” are narratives of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, “which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge” (Taylor 2007, p. 22). These narratives often portray human development as a process in which individuals have relinquished, outgrown, or freed themselves from previously confining horizons, illusions, or cognitive limitations linked to pervasive religious worldviews. According to such subtraction theories, religion is epiphenomenal to society; it is an impediment to human nature that must be discarded for people to fulfill their potential. The assumption is that the removal of religious constraints reveals a purer and more formidable human nature, capable of apprehending reality unclouded by illusion.

By assuming an underlying or background human nature, these “subtraction” accounts rest on problematic essentialism. Additionally, by emphasizing narratives of loss, they obscure the more affirmative trajectory of cultural enrichment, which provides a more comprehensive understanding of secularity. As Taylor (2010, p. 302) contends, “Modernity is defined not just by our ‘losing’ an earlier world, but by the kind of human culture that we have constructed.” Thus, for Taylor, secular modernity arises less from loss and more from the active remaking of culture.

Taylor introduces the concept of “secularity 3,” marked by a shift in “conditions of belief,” to challenge subtraction stories behind two senses of the secular—“secularity 1” (separation of church and state) and “secularity 2” (the supposed decline in religious beliefs and practices). While not dismissing secularity 1 and secularity 2 entirely, he insists that they do not strike at the core of what it means to say that the modern world is secular; they are half-truths at best (Taylor 2007, pp. 1–3).

What sets our secular age apart from earlier epochs, according to Taylor, is the “conditions of belief”, where belief in God or any divinity is “no longer axiomatic.” As such, several alternatives are now available, thus making religious belief “one human possibility among others” (Taylor 2007, p. 3). This is marked by a “fundamental shift” in “plausibility structure” (Taylor 2010, p. 306). It is a “situation of fundamental contestability when it comes to belief” (Smith 2014, p. 10). This new condition places religious beliefs on a “disputed terrain” that makes it possible for them to be challenged and questioned. In this disputed terrain, “there are no more naïve believers, just as there are no naïve atheists” (Taylor 2007, p. 30). The idea of plurality of belief is essential to the condition of secularity in which we find ourselves. As Taylor (2011, pp. 4–5) explains, secularity must be “understood within the broader framework of the diversity of beliefs and values that citizens embrace”.

In line with the aims of this article, we must pay a special attention to the question of what the shift in the “conditions of belief” signaled by modernity contributes to our understanding of the secular. First, it draws the ideas of diversity, plurality, and contestation into the meaning of the secular. Taylor (2007, pp. 303–4; see also pp. 437, 555, and 595) conceptualizes secularity as a milieu that thrives on dissent, contestation, and unflinching interrogation of religious claims, beliefs, and power structures. Secularity becomes a condition defined by a radical plurality of beliefs, a condition where every belief or unbelief is subjected to scrutiny. This unrestricted scrutiny introduces nuance and balance to the meaning of the secular in a manner that overcomes the narrow conceptions of secularization theorists.

The unmitigated questioning that characterizes this shift in conditions of belief occasioned by modernity makes it possible for unbelief to be subjected to the same scrutiny as belief, thus stabilizing the scope of the secular framework. Since our modern era is one in which no single worldview enjoys uncontested authority, both religious and secular positions must justify themselves and contend with one another continuously. Unbelief thus appears not as a new ‘orthodoxy’ but as a contested terrain in which various commitments coexist, clash, and reshape each other (Taylor 2007).

Furthermore, Taylor frames the concept of “conditions of belief” to highlight the co-presence of the religious in the secular, and vice versa. This is consistent with his general understanding of the secular, for there is no single instance in all his discussions on the subject where he draws a bold dichotomous line between the secular and the religious. On the contrary, he acknowledges the mutual interaction between the two spheres, for “God or religion is not precisely absent from public sphere but is central to the personal identities of individuals or groups, and hence always a possible defining constituent of political identities” (Taylor 2007, pp. 193–94). If the public sphere remains open to religious values, then the secular must be reconceived to account for this complexity.

This stance is evident in his famous dialogue with Habermas, where he unhesitatingly endorses religious expressions in politics and the public sphere (Taylor 2011). In addition, his genealogical account of secular ideas takes cognizance of the broader formative role of Christian imaginaries, especially the “Protestant Ethic” (Taylor 2004, 2007). Thanks to Taylor’s insights, we may safely suggest that any conceptualization of the secular/profane that radically excludes religious/sacred elements is doomed to be wrongheaded. Mahmood (2015, p. 22) takes an even more decisive stance. Since “religion has been a constitutive feature of secularism throughout its modern history,” she notes, there is nothing new and “unexpected” about the “copresence of the religious and the secular.”

In conclusion, both Casanova’s “deprivatization” and Taylor’s “conditions of belief” provide conceptual resources for rethinking the secular. By debunking the narrow story of religion’s decline or privatization, recognizing the “copresence” of the religious in the secular (and vice versa), and making diversity, dissent, contestation, and unflinching interrogation of religious power structures the hallmark of our secular “condition,” Casanova and Taylor will open up the horizon of secularity to African contexts, as I demonstrate shortly.

3. Postsecular Discourse and the Plurality of the Secular

This section advances the claim that the contemporary deployment of the term “postsecular”—whose traction has steadily increased in discourses concerning religion’s place in modern society—ought to be understood as a discursive concept that highlights the plurality of secularity. If it is established that the secular is plural and could be enacted in diverse forms not restricted to Western instantiations of it, it becomes possible to imagine that forms of life outside Western contexts, otherwise easily dismissed as relics of ‘archaic’ religious practices, may rightly be secular to all intents and purposes.

On this note, it is useful to suggest that all talk about the postsecular could be viewed as yet another attempt to expand the meaning of secularity beyond the limits placed on it by ‘classical’ conceptions of the secular.

At least, this is how Habermas, to whom the concept is most commonly credited, partly understands his objectives. In “Notes on Post-secular Society,” the seminal writing in which he employs the term “postsecular,” he notes that public consciousness can be described in terms of a post-secular society to the extent that at present it still has to “adjust itself to the continued existence of religious consciousness in an increasingly secularized environment” (Habermas 2008, p. 19). By highlighting the persistent impact of religion in an “increasingly secularized environment,” Habermas firmly positions his narrative as a challenge to the linear and deterministic models advanced by classical secularization theories. This critical stance to secularization theories intensifies as he diagnoses the inadequacies of such models, noting that “the weakness of the theory of secularization is due rather to rash inferences that betray an imprecise use of the concepts of ‘secularization’ and ‘modernization’” (Habermas 2008, p. 19).

A close reading of Habermas’ (2008, pp. 17–19) critique of secularization theories reveals that they are flawed, not so much due to their prediction of religion’s decline, but rather due to their hasty assumption that the secular and the religious inhabit mutually exclusive domains. Such theories typically presume that, should the secular and religious coexist spatially, the ascendancy of the secular is inexorable, compelling the retreat of the religious. Yet, this assumption is belied by concrete realities and philosophical reasoning, both of which affirm the potential for fruitful coexistence of these spheres.

Of particular relevance is the fact that the postsecular concept is premised on the non-exclusive relations between secular and religious domains. Indeed, religious values could make meaningful contributions to politics and the public sphere of modern societies. As Habermas (2006, p. 10) observes, “Religious traditions have a special power to articulate moral intuitions, especially with regard to vulnerable forms of communal life.” Religious perspectives foster solidaristic commitments vital for sustaining a secular order. By affirming that religious perspectives could play a meaningful role in constitutionally secular societies, the postsecular grammar offers us a fuller understanding of secularity, which ruptures the narrow restrictions imposed by classical secularization paradigms and reasserts secularity as an open-ended field of meaning.

The key message for our purposes is that secularity manifests in multifarious forms, compatible with religious expressions, that underline its pluralistic nature.

Yet the postsecular framework does not wish to leave religion unchecked. On the contrary, it puts in place some normative guardrails for the participation of religion in the public sphere. Hence, the postsecular simultaneously legitimates and regulates religion’s participation in a secular society. This concern for moderation has underpinned all notable contributions to the postsecular discourse. For instance, while recognizing that religious insights could make valuable input at the “informal public sphere” of citizens’ day-to-day interaction, Habermas (2006) is generally wary of religious reasoning and sentiments at the “formal public sphere,” i.e., the parliament and high-stakes political echelons where decisions affecting the entire society are made. Society should not base political decisions exclusively on religious sentiments. He thus insists that for religious reasons or arguments to be admitted into formal political spheres, they must be “translated” into secular idioms accessible to all citizens.

From Habermas’ postsecular insights, two central insights emerge that are pertinent to this paper. First, the secular is conceived as inherently receptive to religious practices and viewpoints—a counterpoint to exclusivist rhetorics that divorce religion from the secular. Second, the integration of religion into public life should always be accompanied by prudent safeguards—guardrails designed to sustain a balanced and responsible practice of religion in secular milieux. By conceptualizing the secular as inherently receptive of religion, it becomes possible to see how indigenous African sociocultural practices and forms of life (e.g., those of Igbo society to be analyzed in the next section), often seen from the religious lens, may indeed be simultaneously secular. Without such an expanded conception of the secular that includes religious expressions, African secular contexts could easily be dismissed as relics of ‘ancient’ religious practices. From this standpoint, therefore, the postsecular idiom contributes to the expansion of the horizon of the secular.

In addition, the postsecular grammar ruptures the conceptual confines imposed by the evolutionary logic of secularization theories. It is useful to point out here that the notion that some societies might need to be sufficiently ‘evolved’ for them to be properly called secular rests on an implicit evolutionary logic that stifles the meaning of the secular. This evolutionary conception of the secular goes hand-in-hand with an essentialist characterization of certain societies as ‘primitive’ and as such outside the horizon of the secular—the usual ‘suspects’ being African societies.

By contrast, the postsecular grammar overcomes this evolutionary logic because it refuses to construe secularity and postsecularity as an evolutionary stage or a function of evolutionary achievement. Both secularity and postsecularity are understood not as superior or more advanced chronological moments/stages after a period of enchantment with old religious beliefs, but rather as dynamic forms of life marked by a constellation of both ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ elements held together in relative equilibrium. On this score, Dillon (2012, p. 258) proposes a useful way to make sense of the postsecular idiom: “In my view, the term ‘post-secular’ is more theoretically robust if we use it to help us understand the more general relevance of religion as a public cultural resource in our modern democratic societies regardless of their varying degrees or levels of secularism and secularization.” This “theoretically robust” perspective disavows any linear, evolutionary logic.

Accordingly, it makes sense to propose that any society—irrespective of their historical and geographical situatedness in Europe, Africa or elsewhere—with the requisite cultural mechanisms for negotiating and balancing sacred and profane tendencies to secure social order and overall wellbeing may be rightly recognized as secular. If we get rid of a linear, essentialist construal of secularity imposed on us by secularization theorists, a vista of opportunities opens up for transcending the sacred/profane (religious/secular) divide and exploring the manifold forms of life deserving of the secular designation. As will be seen in the Igbo case, the expanded meaning of secularity is a panoply of features that in-clude (but not limited to) culture of criticism and contestation, plurality of beliefs and viewpoints, right of dissent, freedom to believe or not believe, heterodoxy, humanistic and immanent ideals, freedom to challenge and undermine ‘divine’ authority, assertion of human agency, etc.

This resonates with the objectives of this essay insofar as it draws African (and indeed the non-Western) experiences into the rich and vast horizon of the secular. It is an inclutionist rather than exclusionist proposal. Here, the exclusionist logic of secularization theories is revealed as a form of colonial/racialized thinking, a refusal to acknowledge the possibility of ‘other’ secularities (Bhargava 1998). The task to ‘de-colonize’ or ‘de-racialize’ secularity thus acquires a renewed salience and legitimacy. The imperative of ‘decolonizing’ or ‘de-racializing’ secularity is a task that requires the foregrounding of African secular cultures.

In the next section, I explore the ramifications of secularity in the Igbo world as a paradigmatic illustration of this ‘decolonizing’ enterprise, a means of underwriting the plurality of the secular and concretizing the claims advanced in Section 2 and Section 3.

4. The Secularity of Igbo Forms of Life

Mbiti’s (1970, p. 1) remark that Africans are “notoriously religious” is a rather ambivalent claim, generating negative as well as positive impressions about Africans’ disposition towards religion. In this section, I undertake a closer examination of the (precolonial/pre-Christian1) Igbo world, with the aim of uncovering distinctive worldviews and socio-religious practices that may at least help to provide nuance to any simplistic, reductive, and binary assessment of Mbiti’s remark. The account presented here elucidates how the Igbo people steadfastly asserted their agency amid religious observances, placing paramount emphasis on human wellbeing, while vigorously resisting the overreach of their deities and their clerical representatives. Ultimately, it will be established, drawing on Igbo forms of life, that secularity assumes manifold configurations compatible with religious expressions across varied cultural landscapes.

I rely on writings on Igbo religion and society, such as works by Achebe (1976, [1964] 2016, [1958] 2017), Isichei (1976), and Ottenberg (2006), among others. I make more extensive use of Chinua Achebe’s works (which mostly appear as novels) because, perhaps more than any other Igbo writings, his works powerfully depict aspects of Igbo traditional life and thought that are of interest in this article. Indeed, Achebe’s writings consistently highlight the Igbo capacity to scrutinize and reinterpret oracular directives, their boldness in penalizing their gods for failures or highhandedness, and their transactional liberty to select alternative paths. Such humanistic traits function as strategic instruments to domesticate divine powers, thereby enhancing the bargaining leverage of humans in their interactions with the sacred realm. Like the novels of Dostoevsky which mirror the Russian society of a given historical period, Achebe’s writings are so philosophically-steeped that they uncover the secular meaning-systems of Igbo life and society of that historical juncture.

My submissions on the secularity of the Igbo world resonate well with Igboin (2022), who unmistakably ranks Igbo people among three other African cultures—the Benin (Nigeria), Dagomba (Ghana), and Jola (Senegal)—to whom the secular designation may rightly be applied. Igboin uses the term “religio-secularity” to describe these African secularities. Though the term has some merit, it seems trapped in the old religion-secular binary which falls short of the robust concept of secularity I establish in this paper, one that renders secularity inherently compatible with religious beliefs and practices. Talk about the plurality of the secular or ‘decolonizing’ the secular is only possible with such a richer and more robust concept of secularity. Igboin’s misnomer notwithstanding, he unmistakably points to the existence of secular forms of life in African cultures. Relatedly, in an illuminating and well-crafted introduction to the “multiple secularities in Africa” Special Issue, Burchardt et al. (2024) make a strong case for decolonizing secularity, as they recognize the different forms secularity has taken in various African cultures.

One of the key features of secularity in the Igbo context is the affirmation of diversity/plurality as a fact of life. In the Igbo milieu, plurality is enacted in its profusely polytheistic fabric. The Igbo perceive the perils of vesting unchecked powers in one deity alone. Hence, every deity must be given a rival deity who supplies the same set of needs. Even when a family or clan ‘adopts’ or appropriates a deity, that deity must still have a match or at least a rival deity to ensure balance of power. From the Igbo perspective, monotheistic religions, established on the concept of one God or Truth, have a cardinal flaw of concentrating power in the hands of a single deity, making humans even more vulnerable to the gods. This is why, in Achebe’s ([1958] 2017, pp. 145–47) account, the idea of one true God was perhaps the most problematic doctrinal challenge encountered by Christian missionaries in their earliest attempt to proselytize Igbo natives. Of course, polytheism is not particular to the Igbo. But what makes Igbo polytheism particularly interesting is that it is consistent with Igbo secular imaginaries.

Polytheism goes hand-in-hand with the democratization of belief in Igbo society which in turn dovetails seamlessly with the proliferation of alternatives and the freedom to seek them. Freedom goes beyond choosing one god over another; it indeed entails the freedom not to choose any. This is a quintessential marker of a secular culture for Taylor (2007, p. 3; see also pp. 25–28), who characterizes the conditions of belief in our secular age, inter alia, by the abundance of alternatives, whereby individuals are entirely free to choose whether to believe or disbelieve anything. In this vein, there is a great sense in which being Igbo comes with a certain epistemic acceptance of the fact of alternatives. Since life without alternatives is unimaginable to the Igbo mind, it is unsurprising that there are almost as many gods as there are human devotees. The multiplicity of deities democratizes the religious market, making available a wide range of options from which humans could ‘shop.’ Of course, this is not unexpected of a profoundly humanistic culture where religion largely serves to maximize the wellbeing of humans. Note that this article makes no pretensions to Igbo ‘exceptionalism.’ Igbo only serves as one among many instances of secular thinking in African societies, otherwise assumed to be outside the realm of secularity.

As I have been arguing, there is something peculiarly secular about this freedom, steeped in humanistic thought-patterns, to shop for other gods when one deity fails. A deity may ‘fail’ for a number of reasons. It could be that it has failed to maximize the net material security of a people, conceived in terms of victory in battles, defense against dark spiritual forces, economic plenty, etc. Failure might also mean that the deity has become so high-handed and demanding that the net cost of maintaining the deity outweighs any benefits thereof. A blood-thirsty deity, who finds the blood of goats boring and has acquired a new taste for the blood of the children of his/her devotees, would soon be discarded or set on fire. The people would be left with no other choice than to demystify, ‘unmask,’ and reject such a deity. This is routinely done among the Igbo, as depicted in this passage:

“Let us drive him away as our neighbors of Aninta drove out and burnt when he left what he was called to do and did other things, when he turned round to kill the people of Aninta instead of their enemies. Then the people seized the Chief Priest … and began to push him from one group to another. Some spat on his face and called him the priest of a dead god”.

(Achebe [1964] 2016, p. 160; see also p. 39)

This passage exemplifies the capacity of the people to wield their agency in religious affairs, meting out punishment to the gods if the need arises. Secularity does not mean the abandonment of religion; it rather consists of the ability to wield one’s agency amid religious practices, even if it means harnessing the resources of religion for optimizing human wellbeing in the here and now.

Across reputable studies of Igbo society and religiosity (Achebe 1976, [1964] 2016; Njoku 2009; Oriji 2011; Taiwo 2008; Uchendu 2004; Ude 2024), recurrent motifs emerge: an iconoclastic disposition toward faltering deities, centrifugal tendencies, and a culture of dissent. These elements all help to sustain a religious atmosphere of “cross-pressure” and “mutual fragilization,” described by Taylor (2007, p. 303) as the hallmark of secular modernity. It sustains a condition of healthy rivalry between cults of different deities of the Igbo pantheon, thus minimizing the possibility of the emergence of a hegemonic cult or deity.

Lurking beneath any veneer of conformity are fissures of opinion, contestations, frictions, contradictions, eccentricities, and centrifugal temperaments. Taiwo (2008, p. 7) aptly describes the Umuofia (Igbo) community of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as heterodox. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Achebe [1958] 2017) provides invaluable insights about the Igbo world. Olufemi Taiwo’s reading of Achebe, especially his ingenious reflection on the two characters, Ogbuefi Ezeudu and Obierika, spotlights Igbo heterodoxy. In a telling episode, the community decides to use a slave boy entrusted to the care of a prominent man of the community, Okonkwo, for ritual sacrifice—in obedience to the demands of the Oracle of the Hills and Caves. Both men, at separate times, engaged Okonkwo, presenting cogent arguments as to why the whole idea, especially Okonkwo’s participation in the murder of his foster son, was unreasonable (Achebe [1958] 2017, pp. 57, 66–67). The two characters epitomize the ability of the individual to dissent from the views of many within the community, evincing discretionary courage to challenge or nuance oracular edicts.

Their interventions introduce the element of what I call humanistic commonsense, positing norms that transcend divine whim. Their position does not necessarily stand in opposition to the gods, but it certainly tries to introduce nuance in the interpretation of the oracular message. Making an innocent lad die vicariously for the community burdens the collective conscience; paternal complicity compounds the ethical outrage.

Characters like Ogbuefi Ezeudu and Obierika are not in short supply in the Igbo community. On this note, Taiwo rejects any notion of “exceptionalism” on the part of the two men. Arguing that they are rather ‘mainstream’ individuals, he notes that “Ezeudu and Obierika were neither misfits nor extremely isolated examples” (Taiwo 2008, p. 6). Their position on the matter mirrors the “hetero-doxy” of Igbo society that Taiwo speaks of. It was Ogbuefi Ezeudu and Obierika who acted in this instance; but in Igbo society marked by heterodoxy, other persons could have acted, depending on how strongly one feels about a given issue. In such a society, individuals frequently add nuance to the messages of the gods to make them have a human face and, when necessary, even reject some altogether. Taiwo argues that attention should shift from singular agents to the societal matrix enabling heterodoxy, non-conformity, eccentricity, dissent, freedom of expression, rivalry, difference, and diversity possible. In line with the case I have been making, such a society deserves the to be called secular. In Taylor (2007, pp. 303–4; see also pp. 437, 555, and 595), as well as in Habermas (1996, 2006), secular modernity is conceptualized as a milieu that thrives on dissent, contestation, and unflinching interrogation of religious viewpoints.

We see in Igbo secularity the capacity to subversively challenge divine authority and entrenched religious structures. In the Arrow of God (Achebe [1964] 2016), Achebe narrates the tale of Ulu, a deity holding a privileged station in the pantheon of Umuaro, an Igbo community comprising of six villages. Given Ulu’s privileged status, the priest of Ulu (known as Ezeulu) becomes the Chief Priest, with some leverage over the priests of other deities in the pantheon of Umuaro (Achebe [1964] 2016, p. 15).

Yet the unique place occupied by Ulu and his priest in the community neither commands blind devotion nor unquestioning loyalty from the populace; it instead provokes rigorous critical scrutiny, skepticism, and, during momentous crises, open confrontation. At critical junctures, Ezeulu (the priest of Ulu) faces persistent confrontations with priests of other deities, often with Ezeidemili (the priest of the deity Idemili), who relentlessly seeks to undermine Ulu’s influence (Achebe [1964] 2016, pp. 41–42). Priests and representatives of the deities may be respected but not feared. At the crossroads of history, their counsel, or that of the gods whom they represent, is impugned and their authority called into question by the community or a section of the community.

The following passage poignantly captures some important Igbo sentiments—encompassing perceptions of divine might and priestly jurisdiction—which I construe in secular terms:

“Nwaka began by telling the assembly that Umuaro must not allow itself to be led by the Chief Priest of Ulu. “My father did not tell me that before Umuaro went to war it took leave from the priest of Ulu,” he said. “The man who carries a deity is not a king. He is there to perform his god’s ritual and to carry sacrifice to him. But I have been watching this Ezeulu for many years. He is a man of ambition; he wants to be king, priest, diviner, all. His father, they said, was like that too. But Umuaro showed him that Igbo people knew no kings. The time has come to tell his son also. We have no quarrel with Ulu. He is still our protector, even though we no longer fear Abam warriors at night. But I will not see with these eyes of mine his priest making himself lord over us. My father told me many things, but he did not tell me that Ezeulu was king in Umuaro”.

(Achebe [1964] 2016, pp. 26–27)

At face value, this episode might suggest mere factional strife among priests vying for dominance. Yet beneath the surface, a worldview is discernible that makes a statement about Igbo politics and society (Njoku 2009; Oriji 2011; Uchendu 2004; Ude 2024). The proverbial Igbo dictum “Igbo enweghi eze” (Igbo people have no kings) not only articulates their aversion to monarchical centralization but extends to a wholesale rejection of tyranny, be it exercised by mortals or immortals.

The passage cited above carries a number of sentiments and corollaries that further underline the secularity of precolonial/pre-Christian Igbo society. First, priests are meant to focus as much as possible on the essential aspect of their calling, namely, the performance of rituals. Although Igbo worldviews resist a strict dichotomy between spiritual and temporal realms, a discernible sense of ‘boundary’ and differentiation exists, enabling the community to detect and rebuke instances where an overambitious priest encroaches dangerously upon political terrains. Priests possess the prerogative to voice opinions on a wide range of political affairs, drawing upon their privileged access to divine counsel; yet these interventions remain contestable and are routinely disputed, as evidenced in the quoted discourse.

Crucially, this sense of ‘boundary’ is a cornerstone of secularity. Throughout this essay, the interplay of religion, politics, and other life domains has been emphasized. At this juncture, I need only add nuance to this perspective by pointing out that this interaction does not obliterate the sense of boundary but rather blurs it. In this vein, it makes sense to suggest that the problem with secularization theories is largely that they calcify and essentialize the boundary to the point of excluding or, in fact, banishing religion from society. It is helpful to recall that Casanova and Taylor find the differentiation thesis of secularization theories largely unproblematic.

For Taylor (2004) in particular, an important element that distinguishes our secular modernity from earlier epochs is the “great disembedding,” that is, the freeing of politics, economy, and analogous societal domains from religious/metaphysical underpinnings. As he remarks, the “freeing of politics from its ontic dependence on religion is sometimes what people mean by the secularity of public space. There is no harm in this; indeed, it is probably a good idea to give it this sense” (Taylor 2004, pp. 187–88). However, he rejects the assumption that this separation spells doom for religion, diminishes its power, and heralds its eventual demise.

I should then suggest that Igbo society merits the secular designation to the extent that the functional spheres of society, while profoundly interlinked, are at least sufficiently differentiated. Thus, it would be inappropriate to suppose that Igbo society lacks functional differentiation as is the case in societies where the clan head is both sovereign and priest.

This ties in to the second point of the cited passage, namely, that the ritual expertise or privileges of a priest/priestess are somewhat restricted to matters concerning the deity of which he/she is priest/priestess. It is insisted in the passage that the priest is there to “perform his god’s ritual and to carry sacrifice to him.” The operative word here is “his,” a reminder that the priest is just one of myriads priests at the service of diverse deities in the Igbo pantheon.

Finally, the passage reiterates the disavowal of monarchy among the Igbo. The absence of monarchy and the concomitant disavowal of centralized authority is a feature of Igbo pre-colonial politics that has continued to intrigue scholars. It is not exactly clear how such democratic imaginaries developed among the Igbo. I think it is not plausible to point to some ‘innate’ character of Igbo people; rather, we could make better sense of it by tracing it to hard-won epistemic insights derived from historical experiences, in illo tempore, of the dynamics and vicissitudes of power.

Be that as it may, the nexus between secular imaginaries and the rejection of ‘foundationalism’ is well established in the writings of Taylor. The “Great Disembedding” that delinked society from its supposed foundation on God/Transcendent, in contrast to pre-modern times where society was conceived as having a divine foundation, played a crucial role in the emergence of the secular democracy which effectively displaces God/Transcendent (Taylor 2004, 2007). To be sure, God is relevant to society but not as ‘foundation,’ as it were. The rejection of monarchy is an ingenious political idea with a democratic safeguard, ensuring that the “place of power,” to use a Lefortian concept, remains “empty” (Lefort 1986). Notice that this is so vital to Igbo political sensibilities that the passage carries an explicit threat against any priestly bid to occupy the empty “place.” In my view, Claude Lefort’s definition of modern democracy (in contradistinction to monarchies) in terms of the “emptiness” of the place of power reinforces the attribution ‘secular’ and ‘democracy’ to Igbo society. In addition to Achebe’s writings, vast Igbo scholarship, like Henderson (1972), Ifemesia (1979), Njoku (2009), Oriji (2011), and Ude (2024) to mention but a few, supports this assessment—though the primary objectives and orientations of these works are different from those pursued in this article.

The stress on the ‘boundaries’ of priestly power, the circumscription of the priest’s expertise, and the insistence on the “emptiness” of the symbolic “place of power” are all mechanisms for checking the excesses of priests/priestesses, and, more broadly, for reining in divine power. A people so averse to enslavement by fellow humans, as shown in their legendary rejection of monarchy, cannot submit themselves tamely to the whims of the gods. And so, when the chips are down, even the gods are not spared. The sentiments expressed in these lines represent the readiness on the part of the Igbo community to ‘punish’ the gods when the community’s overall interest is threatened: “And we have all heard how the people of Aninta dealt with their deity when he failed them. Did they not carry him to the boundary between them and their neighbors and set fire on him?” (Achebe [1964] 2016, p. 27).

There is no doubt that Igbo secularity, as elaborated in this section, may not take exactly the same form and shape as in Western, Asian, and other societies. But this once again justifies all talk about the plurality of the secular.

5. Conclusions

Drawing on key concepts from Casanova, Taylor, and Habermas—“deprivatization,” “conditions of belief” and the “postsecular” respectively, I have established the importance of expanding the scope of secularity, such that it embraces a variety of practices and forms of life in non-Western societies, including Africa. It is argued that secularity is best understood as a plurality of historically situated forms of life rather than a single Western conceptual template. Despite their divergent projects, these leading theorists also advance a recurrent motif that the secular and the religious are not mutually exclusive but indeed interact in varied and dynamic configurations.

The analysis of Igbo socio-religious practices then provides a concrete African form of secularity, illustrating that a society can be secular while harboring certain religious practices, values, and imaginaries. Igbo forms of life are secular; this secularity is co-produced with specific religious and cultural practices.

In foregrounding this African case, the article not only challenges the monopoly of Western histories in defining the secular, but also contributes to ongoing efforts to rethink, ‘decolonize,’ and deracialize secularity as a global category of analysis. I believe that the future of secularity lies in ongoing, decentered contestations and conversations across multiple worlds.