(Dis)establishments and the Paradoxes of American Judaism

In thinking with Hollinger, I want to reconsider the question of de-Christianization.  By challenging the notion that there is a pure or meta-discourse that can transcend or become immune to that which formed it, I will argue for seeing more fully how the secular public sphere is a Protestant formation. Following Jakobsen and Pellegrini (2008), I ask how ‘seeing Christian’ and not eradicating it might allow us to imagine inclusion of all kinds of others on different terms? I make these moves out of my work on American Jews and Liberal pluralism. By working through the Protestant nature of the secular, I want to draw connections to this legacy of liberal inclusion. How supple or indeed, inclusive, can this model be given some of the presuppositions on which it was formed? As I will argue, the challenge is all about Liberal inclusion and how this connects back to the relationship between a dominant liberal Protestant vision of inclusion (which looks pretty good from the vantage point of the present in many respects) and the challenge of not repeating—for the sake of a familiar better than neoliberalism or current conditions—a version of this same almost but not quite so inclusive vision of diversity and social embrace of various others in the US context. These remarks build on my work on Jews and secularization and my ongoing efforts to challenge the discourse of classical Liberalism as a means to social inclusion.