In secular Singapore over the past few weeks, a crisis of faith has enraptured an entire nation. All eyes were transfixed on the tribulations of Pastor Rony Tan, a Christian preacher who had destabilised the state’s much-valued principle of religious harmony and repented.

Early this month, clips of him denigrating the Buddhist precepts of rebirth, karma and nirvana entered the public space when they were uploaded on to YouTube. When these were later reposted on Singapore’s online forums, they gained widespread censure from the Republic’s net-savvy citizens.

For Tan’s preaching in these videos had not only snubbed the Buddhists, but also the Taoists who share similar beliefs. These two groups make up about half of the Republic’s population. Christians account for a quarter, as do Muslims and those who profess no religious affiliation. Hindus, meanwhile, comprise some four percent.

Little wonder then that the preacher was approached by security agents, who had urged him to retract his teachings. Within hours of that meeting, Tan had removed these videos from his church’s website. Shortly after, he apologised to the Buddhist and Taoist leaders.

The speed and zealousness at which he acted implied that the preacher never did intend malice in the first place. Rather, his cardinal sin against the nation could be understood as an unwitting conflation of Singapore’s national philosophy of economic pragmatism – which promotes competition in the pursuit of profit – with the religious mission to proselytise.

Indeed, Tan’s criticisms of Buddhist beliefs coincide with the spirit of free market capitalism, where one is free to trounce ‘competitors’ to promote a ‘product’. Except he failed to see that religions are not commodities, and neither are conversions merely a numbers game.

An earlier case of another religious ‘misdemeanour’ last year is equally instructive. This was the leadership takeover of the Association of Women for Research and Advocacy (Aware), an independent feminist organisation in Singapore, by evangelical Christians from a different megachurch last March.

Acting on the alleged charge that Aware leaders were redefining marriage and family by being sympathetic to homosexuals and lesbians, this conservative group resorted to right what they saw as a theological ‘wrong’ through secular means – that is, by turning out in force at Aware’s annual general meeting and voting out the liberals. Here too, as in Tan’s case, the lines between the sacred and the secular been rendered fuzzy.  

Fortunately though, the conservative group’s reign were cut short. Barely two months after taking over, they were voted out in a counter-coup organised by the liberals.

Yet the emergence of these Godly impulses in secular Singapore is not just a ground-up phenomenon. It is notable that the Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong chose to comment on the Aware saga by invoking biblical images. Urging the Republic’s citizens to uphold religious harmony, he said that Singapore’s peaceful religious milieu and efficiency makes it a “Garden of Eden state”. 

Even the economic sector has been touched by the hand of God. Three years back, Singapore’s financial regulators approved the establishment of the Islamic Bank of Asia, which sells Shari’ah-compliant financial products to corporate clients primarily from the Middle East. While one can argue that this move was motivated by economic more than religious reasons, it had nevertheless also challenged the secular ideal that faith is personal, and never public.

These examples suggest that Singapore could be transitioning from a secular society into a post-secular one. That is, the island-state is slowly losing a sense that society can be managed according to the strict separation of the sacred and the secular.

If this is inevitable, how can mult-religious Singapore deal with its post-secularity without damaging the fragile state of its religious harmony?

As a start, one would do well to heed the words of political scientist Vincent Geoghegan who wrote in a 2001 essay: “A post-secular perspective … betokens not a rejection of the secular, but a recognition that the achievements of the secular will not be lost by a more nuanced approach to religion”.

In some respect, Singapore is already doing that, specifically with Muslim affairs. It had, for example, established the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore as the overarching body overlooking the conduct of Islam. In terms of family laws, Muslims are also governed by Islamic-inspired laws that are different from the civil law that govern non-Muslims.

Here, the post-secular condition to embrace a more nuanced approach to religion translates as an endeavour to update these laws according to prevailing societal conditions. This could mean, for instance, re-looking at aspects of Singapore’s Shari’ah laws that are seen to be discriminatory against women. After all, this was indeed a cause for concern for the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (Cedaw) committee, which monitors discriminatory practices against women globally, when they met with the Singapore delegation three years back.

If the keyword to post-secularity is not to fear religiosity, but incorporate it into society in a sensitive manner, then such a change must begin with the education system. This could mean expanding the minor religious studies programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS) into a full-blown department in the same manner that other notable world-class universities like Oxford and Yale had done. In fact, why stop at the NUS? 

Then there is also the possibility of introducing an interfaith module in secondary schools so that Singapore’s future generation would not have been as easily duped as Rony’s audience in those YouTube clips when they encounter the likes of his regressive rhetoric. Singapore can only really start fancying itself as heaven on earth if it takes that first step of acknowledging its post-secular turn.