Summary
In Lybarger’s ideal-typical usage, any social orientation, practice, mode of solidarity or stance that implicitly or explicitly resists, rejects, demotes, ignores or otherwise suspends, momentarily or permanently, the prior claim of religious authority (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.44).
Details
- Palestinian secular nationalism is secular to the extent it privileges national identity and belonging above specific sectarian religious solidarities; historically it affirmed religious identities as part of the Palestinian cultural mosaic with the caveat that no single religion retains a privileged position, emphasizing multisectarian unity under the nation, while its Marxist forms at times rejected religion outright as “false consciousness” (PDF p.30, p.44).
- Secularism can blend empirically with religious orientations: a person may adhere to a religion while adopting a secular, not necessarily secularist, stance in spheres beyond the religious community (PDF p.44).
- In Chicago, secularism was deinstitutionalized by the collapse of the PLO-oriented community centers after the Gulf War and Oslo, but did not disappear: traditional secular nationalism continues, and new, deinstitutionalized secularities have appeared, often in reaction against the new piety (PDF p.32, p.38).
- There are multiple secularisms and secularities, not a simple “modern secularism”; Lybarger’s focus is secularism as individual subjectivity and conception of self rather than as state policy (PDF p.46).