Reviewing a new book by Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse - and whether reporting on it accurately or not I'm in no position to say - Stanley Fish tries to persuade us of a logical hole within the secular liberal viewpoint. That viewpoint, according to Fish, hopes to exclude religion from the public and political realm, reserving matters of faith to the private sphere, but it cannot truly succeed in this, because secular reasoning has no normative content; to find a basis for knowing what to do, for deciding issues of actual policy, the would-be secularist has to smuggle the non-secular back in, so that he or she is relying on what had supposedly been banished beyond the boundaries of the public realm.
The whole argument rests on an expansion of the concept of the secular. Secularism I take to mean the view that the state should not concern itself with adjudicating between the claims of different faiths or between the claims of religion as such and non-belief. For the secularist these are not political matters; we are all free to pursue our own beliefs pertaining to religion. And within the polity none of these beliefs is privileged in arriving - through discussion, persuasion, the articulation of interests, democratic decision - at social and political policy.
However, possibly following Smith's book, Fish effects a shift of meanings whereby 'secular' comes to mean, not neutral as between different faiths or between different faiths and agnosticism or atheism, but just neutral, period. Secular discourse, in this usage, means something like: empirical and statistical data, the corpus of scientific results, naturalistic facts - all of this lacking any normative dimension. Secularism, in other words, Fish opposes not only to beliefs about religion, but to every type of moral or metaphysical commitment. It is but short work, then, to show that secular liberalism can generate no substantive policy decision, political programme or course of action. For the neutral information piled up 'just sits there, inert and empty'. To know what to do with it, or where to go from it, we have to smuggle in such principles as... freedom or equality or justice. Bingo! Neutrality is lost, and so, accordingly, is secularism.
Fish thereby collapses one issue into another - or so I see it, anyway. He shows that secular liberalism has some moral content. On this I think he is right. I have never been persuaded by the brand of liberalism that claims to be above all partisan commitments in the political sphere. That everyone has rights or is entitled to vote or should be treated fairly and impartially when they apply for some position - these are not neutral positions. They are more consonant with some ideological outlooks than with others. But Fish treats this conclusion - that liberalism is not morally neutral - as being identical with a deconstruction of secularism - that the secular state allows freedom to all faiths and to non-faith without restriction. He only succeeds in doing so by uselessly thinning down our stock of available meanings. (Via Ophelia.)