Live-blogging from Malibu: Steve Smith on secular legitimacy

Steve Smith presented a paper on the secular paradigm of legitimacy:

What makes a government legitimate?  Elements of tradition, public display, and effectiveness, but will also be made in light of intellectual premises that prevail in that society -- divine right, consent of the governed, etc.  That is the paradigm of legitimacy.  We've moved from a Christian paradigm to a secular paradigm.  In a pluralist society, legitimacy paradigms depend on strategies of assimilation and marginalization.

Does a secular paradigm require that criteria of legitimacy be secular (e.g., consent of the governed), or that the government be secular in order to be legitimate?  Today society practices strategies of assimilation to inculcate secularism (e.g., through public schools), but proponents have made use of other strategies, including the neutrality strategy (i.e., government is neither favorable nor unfavorable to religion, but simply neutral), which tends to marginalize religion by pushing it to the private sphere.  In many parts of the world, including the U.S., religion has not cooperated with the secular paradigm, and secularization has not proved to be irresistable. 

The secular paradigm is in serious distress.  For example, though Rawls might fit comfortably within a largely secularized culture, it does not fit with a pluralist but still religiously vibrant culture.  His favored position doesn't fit the world as it actually is.

What do we have to look forward to?  A paradigm in crisis can recover, and an ailing paradigm can persist until another one comes along.  It is possible that our most fundamental commitment is to making sure that the government is based on the consent of the people, rather than to making sure that the government is secular.  Relationship between religion and democracy has been reassessed in places like Iraq; may also ultimately be reassessed in a place like America.