Reading List (2024)

Author: Joseph Blankholm

Central research question

something like, what is the identity of secular people?

Thesis or theses

being secular is underpinned by paradox—being non-religious and religious, universal and historically particular, negative and positive—and this is generative of change, reflection, and even cohesion, rather than a hypocrisy which when punctured will collapse into "really" being only non-religious or only religious.

Methods

ethnographic (participant-observation, interviews with participants in organized secularism) + historicization of the tradition

Summary of argument(s)

• secular people at times reject "believing in," which they associate with religion, insisting instead that their empiricism and (belief in progress) is a passive, unconstructed acquiescence to fact. at other times (or other secular people, humanists, Ethical Culture people) assert they do have positive in-beliefs, as they hold determinate values.
• organized nonbelievers form groups which may be more or less church-like, and are animated by the problems of secular purification: is it okay to form groups? groups which resemble religious groups in form but evacuate religious substance? problems are further complicated for minority secular people who deviate from the older-white-male secularism whose prototype of religion negated is protestant. hispanic non-believers, humanistic jews, and black atheists each face accusations from their ethnic communities that religion is intrinsic to their ethnicity and ethnicity intrinsic to them, and accusations from the secular majority that they are being sectarian and not sufficiently universal for feeling alienated by the majority culture.
• a secular condition is established/purified through various ritual means: avoidance (not saying "bless you"), blaspheming one's religious habitus (observing christmas as an ex-JW, violating muslim dietary rules, joking), abstraction (from "merry christmas" to the plurality of "happy holidays" or the vagueness of "have a good break"), and translating between ontologies (articulating meditation in naturalist terms).
• becoming secular is construable as bare deconversion or conversion-adoption of a new worldview, so secular people with qualms about the ethical legitimacy of converting others work anxiously to advocate for existing nonbelievers without converting new ones, or if they do try to make new ones, they must disclaim agency by making the secular worldview out to be an automatic result of the believer's confrontation with facts or reason.
• secular people participate in a discursive tradition. an enlightenment side of that tradition defines itself by the always-renewed break with tradition, and so is loathe to recognize itself as a tradition. a humanist side draws continuity to renaissance humanism and before that the pre-christian classical world, and tries to recover a pure origin. we have to recognize both these sides, secularism's irreducibility to christianity and its substantial entanglement with christianity. more generally, we need to see conflict as intrinsic to and definitive of a discursive tradition, which helps us recognize a wider variety of forms of secularism than the liberal and humanist ones: in marxist (state) atheism, critical theory, continental philosophy, afro-futurist sci-fi. and it lets us recognize the reciprocal influence of secularism on christianity.

Scholars the author is in conversation with

Asad, Yelle, Rubenstein, Ada Palmer, Mahmood

Criticism

Praise

this is the most clarifying thing we've read in this course, especially coming at the end; i was definitely not prepared to understand it thoroughly when i last read.

Open questions and paths forward

i think there's a lot to be said still about the operation of the secular paradox in these other areas identified like continental philosophy and marxism. i also like the idea raised of talking about the reification of religion as "religionism" rather than secularism.

Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”

• ism is something you're on the inside of and identify with (christianism, secularism) whereas ity is a "broader inheritance" one finds oneself in despite affiliation
• secularization is mostly avoided in favor of secular purification, an analysis of techniques secular people use to appropriate practices, notions, and their own bodies

"1492: A New World View"⁹

1. Author: Sylvia Wynter

2. Central research question

   do we side with the "triumphalist" (white) or "dissident" (indigenous) take on 1492?

3. Thesis or theses

   we take the third (black) option, which means universalism (among the animals called human, anyway) (kind of not sure why this is black though)

4. Methods

   it's basically myth-remaking synthesis of theories of culture

5. Summary of argument(s)

   • in the past, humans have only known things within a system of categories predetermined by the ideological system of their society, whose aim is to continue that class structure
   • what defines humans is our special social capacity for "altruism," except actually true altruism has never been tried, because we can only read other people through local cultural stereotypes, and have a very limited notion of "us" instead of seeing each other as all human
   • hence premodern muslims could not have genuine ethnographic knowledge of africans they wanted to see as enslaveable, and christians took others as "idolaters" or "natural slaves" because it would benefit them, and mesoamerican people under aztec rule could only live in terms of their clans-and-sacrifice social system
   • even though these category-systems are total and not vulnerable to empirical disconfirmation, columbus SOMEHOW obtained access to an apocalyptic millenarian worldview that (unlike the reigning scholastic one) convinced him crossing the atlantic was viable, and as a result we've lived under a "might as well check, just in case" empiricist rule since, and also discovered the variability of human culture
   • the unfulfilled post-1492 promises of universalism and science will be fulfilled when we turn our irrational/unconscious cultural inheritance/societal goals into something run rationally (aka hegelian communism)
   • religion is the fake bullshit all people believed in in the past, but we can get rid of it with the acid of reason

6. Scholars the author is in conversation with

   Varela, Foucault (The Order of Things)

7. Criticism

   • i hadn't read Wynter before and somehow had the impression she was a much edgier theorist, but this is all very conventional

   • she's doing sleight of hand to derive a teleology. she says humans are intrinsically altruistic (a neologism i still reject), and when the facts differ, she doesn't drop the hypothesis, but changes to "humans should/will be altruistic." i say instead that we can construe the natural fact of human sociality as dependence, not altruism—because i can only live in dependence on others, they have power over me, which makes hierarchy possible. animals which don't need to stick around their parents learning complex cooperative skills for years if they're going to survive can more easily walk away from a bad situation

   • from a buddhist/daoist pov i (as usual) don't see why "humans" should be our basic set of morally/politically relevant agents, instead of all sentient beings, including firstly other animals

   • the social/semiotic capacities she calls linguistic/verbal are actually broader than the word

   • her whole setup is run through with kantian errors. she wants to distinguish what is known from the categories through which it is known, and say that the categories are preconditions for knowledge, so they aren't mere "facts" vulnerable to alteration in light of other "facts"; they're the very rules by which facts become present to us.

   • but whereas Kant said these categories (space/time/quantity/etc.) are universal to all individual subjects, she wants to do like Heidegger, or like Foucault in The Order of Things, and apply them at the level of a "whole" culture, and make them historically variable. so members of a culture know things only in the way their culture lets them.

   • known bug in this: it makes it impossible to explain how epistemes actually do change. (we need a Kuhnian scientific paradigms type understanding here…)

     • how can there be a "transculturally verifiable image of the earth and conception of the cosmos" if cultural categories cannot be disconfirmed by philosophical reasoning or empirical evidence?

   • on top of that, she makes culture a type of "evil functionalism" common to unreconstructed marxist theories of ideology. where Heidegger/Foucault would not have said there was any governing purpose to the immanent pattern of an episteme, she says it's all organized around a religious end that converges with continuing a given society's organization of cruelty

   • after all of this kantian stuff that can't explain historical change, she finally does introduce some lessons recognizably from Hegel: by becoming aware of the broken unconscious cultural baggage that currently controls us, we can make it truly ours and regulate it consciously, overcoming arbitrary particularity and reaching the universal. but there's not shortage of problems with this, too!

   • Hegel's style of universalism says that you need to negate your particularity to reach universal humanity, and so stigmatizes anyone who hasn't submitted to whatever european enlightenment lovers have decided characterizes the universal. it's basically a replay of the christian supersessionist move in which those who have "overcome the distinction between jew and greek" will freak the fuck out and pogrom you if you aren't on board with the update and insist on remaining merely a jew

   • i realize she's not saying Hegel but instead Fanon and sociogenesis so you could accuse me of pattern-matching. but still

   • she talks like monotheism has a singular genealogy, but is that really true??

   • why are Aristotle's natural slaves "secular" while idolaters aren't?

   • she says,

     the role of our religious traditions is to “condition” the subjects of their order, so as to inculcate in them tendencies that are in direct opposition to the temptations representing for the most part the directly “oppositional tendencies” produced by our instinctual animal-type mode of altruism. Such, indeed, is the role of all our modes of discourse and symbolic representation systems, religious and non religious, with the exception of the natural sciences that arose precisely on the basis of their rupture from this role

     • the idea that we have a base level of "instincts"/"temptations" and at a higher level must resist them through religion…isn't this just Augustine's account of desire?
     • isn't there an argument that natural sciences are just as much ideological tools, just subtler ones than their predecessors because they must satisfy the exponential thirst of capitalism rather than the merely linear demands of previous class societies whose thirst reached only so far as the direct luxury consumption needs of their rulers?

8. Praise

   • to be clear, this is all a fable and one with holes, but it's also my fable. if we can't make universalism and the rational reappropriation of human culture happen, history is a total wash. if everyone understood the theory in this paper i would be really happy because i would have someone to listen to me when i go to poke holes in it
   • i specifically completely agree with anchoring it in 1492 and not e.g. the industrial revolution
   • i also think the point about convergence between (Columbus') apocalyptic millenarianism and imperialism is an important one; it's necessary to dispel the romance of the anti-imperial millenarian

9. Open questions and paths forward

   the Oliphant article shows how we can apply this "global" framing to modernity instead of making a "secular" one primary

10. Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”

    secularization = "degodding," a transition from an "other-wordly" supreme goal of redemption to a "this-worldly" supreme goal of the european state's political imperatives

"The secular and the global: rethinking the anthropology of Christianity in the wake of 1492"¹⁰

1. Author: Elayne Oliphant

2. Central research question

   what difference does the wake of 1492 make?

3. Thesis or theses

   it basically sounds like some anthropologists want to get in on the "being nice by taking seriously what your informants say" thing, when this is very dangerous with christianity, which is a world-historical evil bent on subjugating and annihilating other forms of life (even if it's been other things at times too). so they start talking to theologians, and the theologians say "well sometimes what people do is 'heresy,' which is very bad."

4. Methods

   an Intervention (review/criticism of existing work)

5. Summary of argument(s)

   • 4 ways christian theology is brought to bear on social science
     • one "making space for difference" (this person Robbins)
     • Milbank types who criticize social science from the position of theology
     • Marx using "the fetish" to think thru "contradictions" of modernity
     • Lofton assessing our practices as religious
   • but what we need beyond this for anthropology to draw from political theology (Kotsko) and theo-politics

6. Scholars the author is in conversation with

   see above. i actually spent sunday reading Kotsko's book because of this article and it made me kind of insane. he's kinda got an annoying vibe online but he really lays it out.

7. Criticism

   • "what theological, historical, and material difference does—what Christina Sharpe (2016) refers to as ‘the wake’ of—1492 make?" i can't stand this kind of compulsive overcitation. take out Sharpe's name and the quotation marks and put them in the footnote, your sentence will read far more intelligibly. a healthy language is one in which a good turn of phrase can be adopted generally, and those who do recognize its origin can be happy to know they are well-read. in our hyperscrupulous citational culture, explicit tags to often dead authors like "as Marx said, but in a completely different context(…)" weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. ok just messing around here

8. Praise

9. Open questions and paths forward

   i think this raises once again the under-addressed contradiction in scholars' feelings toward their objects of study. are "religious people" epistemically oppressed by scholars not believing their claims about spirits/whatever or are they (in the case of a lot of christians) something we v much don't want to get behind? "religion" ends up naming these things that have v different historical baggage attached and a given scholar often only works on one tradition. i think this underlines the need to be careful about those feelings that make "caretaking" [is that the right use of this?] seem so plausible.

10. Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”

    the "secular condition" is a framing of modernity, to which the "global condition" (focusing on the historical event of 1492 and what ensued therefrom) can be opposed

"Is Religious Freedom Protestant? On the History of a Critical Idea"¹¹

1. Author: Udi Greenberg

2. Central research question: see title

3. Thesis or theses

   the idea that religious freedom/secularism is "protestant" in nature is originally a catholic response to the french revolution

4. Methods

   historical

5. Summary of argument(s)

   • the original catholic "secular=protestant/individualist in disguise" criticism, which was occluded during the cath/prot 20th century anticommunism teamup, now gets kinda laundered thru Milbank (who doesn't name his antecedents), Asad (who makes it "left"), and so on
   • this very malleability of protestantism undercuts the notion that protestantism could provide a stable identity beneath secularism

6. Scholars the author is in conversation with

7. Criticism

   not sure it's really a criticism but after showing that the only thing that made these varieties of christianity accept each other was recognizing their deeper political commitment to empire, it feels like a pretty vain hope to say maybe they could become more flexible

8. Praise

9. Open questions and paths forward

   this is esp relevant for the issues that come up in Hurd's book

10. Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”

    secularism is about religious freedom here, which the catholic critique says imposes individualism on what was once communitarian life.

"Did Premodern Muslims Distinguish the Religious and Secular? The Dīn–Dunyā Binary in Medieval Islamic Thought"¹²

1. Author: Rushain Abbasi

2. Central research question: it's in the title

3. Thesis or theses

   Those who say premodern Islam did not know a religious/secular distinction are wrong, though it certainly differed from the modern "West" in putting religion on top

4. Methods

   read medieval islamic sources and see how they use the words

5. Summary of argument(s)

   the answer seems to be clearly yes

6. Scholars the author is in conversation with

   Asad, islamism

7. Criticism

   a couple really stupid lines:

   • "Drawing on the field of CSR (Cognitive Science of Religion), one might even say that many of these concepts, which can be found across a variety of human cultures, are simply the products of the way in which our human minds are wired." come on, who the hell believes in cog"sci"
   • "the universal dichotomy of good and evil is an example of a valid and useful binary that no one would attempt to problematize" i can name very many who would disagree lol. the author's belief that the religion/secular distinction is transhistorically universal in some form "because systems theory" is goofy

8. Praise

   good point well taken

9. Open questions and paths forward

   i suppose you could ask this same question in a lot of other premodern situations. also we have to see what the difference is between identifying general conceptual areas of religious/secular vs institutionalizing those along a private/public division

10. Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”

    the secular or worldly is whatever isn't specifically religious; it includes the pursuit of wealth and honor, natural science, and governance, though these may be religionized if done with the right ends/framing

Author: Saba Mahmood

Central research question

beginning fieldwork intended to be about quranic hermeneutics, she encountered all this controversy about religious minorities, new since the 90s, prompting her to ask whether it was an old problem that had been suppressed or a recent deterioration of relations.(p.16)

Thesis or theses

the problem with Egypt isn't "not enough secularism"; secularism itself produces and builds up majority-minority differences and has bias toward the majority.

Methods

she begins from ethnography but is stimulated to move to historical sources, though she insists (following Asad) to still be employing an anthropological mode of inquiry.

Summary of argument(s)

• (ch.2) minorities occupy a necessarily fraught position in the nation-state in which trying to have discrimination recognized means opening yourself up to accusations of diverging from the nation. the state equivocates about the relevance of religion to citizenship ("Muslim by nation…?")
• (ch.3) panic over Muslim men ostensibly kidnapping Coptic women and forcing them to convert is actually a result of the Coptic church's excessive anti-divorce position (and unaccountability to the laity), so that people are forced to convert just to get their divorce judged under Islamic family law. all of this is due to the secular state's linking of religion, family, and sexuality as "private" so that in Egypt family law is religion-specific.
• (ch.4) Egyptian discriminatory treatment of Bahais is inflected by the official Muslim-biased position of recognition for only people of the book, but in the same way that European secular states discriminate in favor of crucifixes and against headscarves because they conceive religion itself on a majoritarian model
• (ch.5) controversy over the novel Azazeel shows how humanism/secularism wants to make its kind of history the ultimate court for deciding the meaning of the past, and to a great extent has suceeded

Scholars the author is in conversation with

Asad on every page

Criticism

i can accept the points she's making about the similarities between Egyptian and e.g. French state ways of handling religion being more important than the differences, but i'm still not sure if it makes sense to call it "secularism."

Praise

i found all of this super interesting

Open questions and paths forward

maybe the state should impose democratization on the church hierarchy

Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”

• secularism enforces a public/private divide with religion on the private side, it claims religious equality as an ideal, but it also intervenes to regulate "public" religion based on a "public order" principle conceived from a majoritarian position
• secularity: "a substrate of ethical sensibilities, attitudes, and dispositions"(p.212)

Author: Talal Asad

Central research question

"what might an anthropology of secularism look like?" can apply to the whole book and not only the first chapter. he wants to use genealogy to give context to the secular/secularism.

Thesis or theses

the book isn't organized around a single intervention, it's more of a relaxed stroll sometimes. Asad is interested in uncovering ways in which secularism/liberalism has a substantive concept of the human, which cannot be a neutral ground for living out just any conception of the good life, but makes some of them impossible (e.g. a modern human must not pursue gratuitous pain, and the private subject of conscience cannot be trained into virtue in the pre-enlightenment aristotelian way).

Methods

genealogical and comparative, what he calls "anthropology," interested in the "grammar of concepts"—he distinguishes this from empirical research but also considers it to be grounded more grounded in practice than classic history of ideas

Summary of argument(s)

• (ch.1) liberalism kinda has built in a colonial mission ("garden in a dark jungle"). if we follow Walter Benjamin, the secular attachment to "this world" comes from a skepticism that comes from the fragmentariness and unreliability of allegory as a way of apprehending the world(?) i don't understand this very well.
• (ch.2) modern people are expected to have "agency" and be "responsible." anthropologists go looking for "resistance," i.e. covert agency on the part of those they consider oppressed. pain is considered something always passive, something that interrupts thought, though in fact we could also consider it a form of judgment, something that begins in the brain, and people have sought pain and considered it meaningful for various reasons historically. people's behavior has not always been about responsibility, or even duty, either: Oedipus is misread this way, but actually he puts out his eyes and goes into exile not because he is responsible but because he can't bear to look (an issue of habitus) and to save the city from something he did not choose.
• (ch.3) cruelty, torture, and suffering are categories which aim to be universal but measure incommensurable things
• (ch.4) in the human rights system, it's imagined that nothing essential to one's humanity is violated by economic or military action, because these affect you as a citizen and not a human. and there's no recourse for litigating harms to one's humanity, anyway, because the highest level of power on earth is just the ruling nation-states (the Arendt point).
• (ch.5) Europe is defined in such a way that Muslims can never be European, but only an outside minority present in it. identity in terms of nation, culture, civilization, and political norms are expected to line up at the same borders. Asad wants instead a "complex space" (following Millbank) in which people can have multiple overlapping affiliations.
• (ch.6) Casanova's breakdown of secularization theses doesn't work because deprivatization compromises differentiation and decline. the kind of religion palatable to modernity has been one that accepts the distinction of law and morality, separate regions governed by state and conscience.
• (ch.7) in 19th/early 20th cent. Egypt sharī‘a was made into a modern institution dealing with the family (itself modern)…there's a lot of stuff about the introduction of a law vs morality distinction and about virtue but i don't fully grasp the argument

Scholars the author is in conversation with

there's a lot of Nietzsche/Foucault (genealogy), Wittgenstein (language games/forms of life/conceptual grammar), Ian Hacking (the human soul's existence is relative to the historical concepts it's produced through), Alasdair Macintyre (aristotelian virtue tradition), John Millbank, Lila Abu-Lughod. he takes issue with Charles Taylor, Elaine Scarry, and Jose Casanova.

Criticism

it's not super clear why "secular" is the category under which to understand some of the phenomena Asad discusses, as opposed to e.g. modern. that said, i don't think opacity is always a crime. the book also doesn't say up front how this all cashes out politically, and i think people want it to, but again i don't think Asad/anthropology is required to know or be willing to explicate that.

Praise

• the historical variability of pain/suffering is really important and i need to think more about. it's unsettling. it's hard, harder than anything and hard everyday, to find criteria by which we can determine what kind of life it's okay for ourselves and others to undergo.
• legal judgment being justified based on embodied virtue acquired through long submission to a certain discipline is exactly the kind of thing i'm interested in. i need to read more of his work. virtue is goated!!

Open questions and paths forward

this raises questions about whether a "deeper" pluralism is possible than has usually gone under the name secular/liberal, something i know is taken up by Liberalism's Religion and William Connolly.

Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”

• ch.1–3 are about "the secular," 4–6 "secularism," 7 "secularization"

• the secular: conceptually prior to secularism, "epistemic," requires the distinction between private reason (where religion must go) and public principle

• secularism: "a modern doctrine of the world in the world"(p.15), seems to be more explicitly about politics

• anthropology: he takes what is distinctive about anthropology to be not fieldwork but (following Mauss and Mary Douglas) but cross-society comparison of "embedded concepts" (p.17)

• modernity:

  a project—or rather, a series of interlinked projects—that certain people in power seck to achieve. The project aims at institutionalizing a number of (sometimes conflicting, often evolving) principles: constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism, freedom of the market—and secularism. It employs proliferating technologies (of production, warfare, travel, entertainment, medicine) that generate new experiences of space and time, of cruelty and health, of consumption and knowledge. The notion that these experiences constitute "disenchantment"—implying a direct access to reality, a stripping away of myth, magic, and the sacred—is a salient feature of the modern epoch.(p.13)

Author: Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Central research question

what are the effects of "religious freedom" becoming an international policy concern?

Thesis or theses

governing institutions and their associated experts construe "religion" in a partial way that reconstructs human realities on the ground more than it describes them.

Methods

she's a political scientist. besides secondary sources on religion, she cites a lot of news articles.

Summary of argument(s)

• (ch.2) much scholarship has moved from a secularization-as-privatization narrative to one of recuperating/"bringing back in" religion and denigrating the "secular." this accompanies a political narrative that splits religion into "2 faces" [pointing mouth open omg they made Melanie Klein real], a dangerous extremist variety vs the proper, pro-social variety that must be promoted, so that religion is both a problem and its own solution.
• (ch.3) framing social differences thru religious rights/freedoms (1) singles groups out for legal protection as religious groups, (2) molds religions into discrete communities with clear boundaries, orthodoxies, and leaders, and (3) privileges a modern liberal understanding of faith
• (ch.4) US exceptionalism: the United $nakes of AmeriKKKa considers itself posits itself as the place where religion and freedom are perfected, and takes as its mission promoting "religious freedom" abroad—a continuous project since it began trying to use safe (not just KKKristian) religion to promote anti-communism abroad in the Cold War. only those leaders and institutions friendly to the US and matching the US idea of religion receive its support.
• (ch.5) international attempts to define "religious minorities" are incredibly fraught, as seen in the case of Alevism. is it a muslim sect? a non-muslim group? something in between? in Turkey, recognizing Alevis as a non-muslim minority sharpens lines and brings them more hate, whereas identifying them as Sunni gives the state license to push them into an orthodoxy they don't want.
• taking religious belonging as prior to politics and religion as a motivator for action means that conflict doesn't have to be understood as historical, political, and economic, and therefore capable of implicating empire, instead it's just "religious conflict" which requires management, has a good side and a bad side, and is kind of inevitable

Scholars the author is in conversation with

the name i see over and over is Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (what a splendid name)

Criticism

i did try to think of some, but i'm coming up short.

Praise

she's got a clear and valuable point and makes it well. what more is there to say?

Open questions and paths forward

• in our research we should disaggregate political sectarianism and not treat religion as a "thing" with causal powers. i feel that i at least knew that already, and knew that to do otherwise was ideological, but i'm glad to have a real reference for why and how that ideology has been here.

Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”

• both "faces" of religion are internal to secular politics and could be described as secularist—secular government must construct religion as its object—but she "maintains a distance from the discussion and debate over secularism"(p.11)
• secularization-as-privatization thesis: religion becomes irrelevant to global governance. but this has become less popular, she says.
• expert religion: construed by experts in "policy-relevant" knowledge, has "agenda of reassurance"
• lived religion: actually-existing, the target of governance, often exceeds imposed schemas of discrete religions or is simply illegible to them, though participants respond to incentives created by those schemas and may rearticulate their practices through them
• governed religion: construal of religion by those with power—courts, NGOs, churches, etc.

Author: Jacques Berlinerblau

Central research question

this is more an undergraduate textbook than a research project but we can say it's "what are the distinctive features of political secularism"

Thesis or theses

• secularism is not often understood clearly but comprises a set of distinctive and important principles we can't really go back on

Methods

readings of some primary sources from western intellectuals, and otherwise synthesis of existing research

Summary of argument(s)

the principles of secularism are

1. equality of humans
2. division between two powers (church/state or similar)
3. state supremacy
4. internal constraint
5. freedom of conscience
6. order (as justification for limiting religious behavior)
7. toleration
8. belief/acts distinction
9. disestablishment/neutrality
10. reason

we have 4 frameworks of political secularism

1. separationism (~US, supposed to value neutrality first)
2. laïcité (france, wants to deny outright public expression of religion)
3. accommodationism (india, believes religion is a public good but should be promoted without partiality to sect)
4. soviet state atheism (incl. PRC, thinks religious belief must not be let near the state and in the long run must be got rid of generally)

Scholars the author is in conversation with

it's not super clear who is actually influencing him, or it doesn't cohere in a way i recognize. he definitely thinks the historical work just hasn't been done yet.

Criticism

• this is so frustrating, tedious, and condescending lol
• constantly takes for granted his own centerlib politics and reads history from its angle
• he just makes up what he wants (political) secularism to mean now, and then assimilates whatever he feels like to its emergence, so we actually learn nothing about where the term came from. then when Holyoake, who actually coined it, appears in the book, Berlinerblau treats him like the weird outlier for being concerned with a different issue
• he's totally dismissive of left criticism of secularism and lumps it as "POMOFOCO" (what the hell??)
• and of course at the same time has very little to say about the role of his heroes of proto-secularism (Luther, Locke) in horrendously objectionable histories (anti-semitism, colonialism)
• it's just him stringing beads together into a necklace. and his finding the roots of equality in the idea of man's being made in the image of god is soo goofy. that's not intellectual history

Praise

the breakdown of principles is a useful mental reference

Open questions and paths forward

• when and why did people start calling this political framework secularism?

Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”

• political secularism "refers to legally binding actions of the secular state that seek to regulate the relationship between itself and religious citizens, and between religious citizens themselves"(p.179)

Authors: Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, Ryan T. Cragun

Central research question

is "secularization" happening? (yes)

Thesis or theses

despite what many scholars who claimed to value empirics over ideology said, the decline of religious belief/belonging/behavior is borne out by statistics as a global trend, causally linked to development and modernization, and even putatively exceptional case studies only confirm the theory's logic.

Methods

soo many statistics

Summary of argument(s)

• economic development leads to differentiation and rationalization, which lead to a couple other things and all together lead to secularization
• global trends are towards secularization wherever there's modernization
• very different specific case studies (Norway, Chile, South Korea, the US) all bear out the theory, even when you might not expect them to
• secular people live perfectly normal lives, have been around forever, in some places form the majority, reproduce their (non-)beliefs better than religious people—i.e. are natural
• secular people are mostly indifferent towards religion, and find value in their social existence, they just go to dnd clubs instead of church, and have different marriage/funeral rites
• looking at cases where (a) catholicism took the job of representing nationhood, (b) the state imposes religiosity, (c) the state imposes secularism, we find that in the long run the theory still holds

Scholars the author is in conversation with

• Jean-Marie Guyau, Comte, Durkheim ("classical secularization theory"); Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann (religious pluralism as explanation for secularization), Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (existential security as exp)
• Rodney Stark

Criticism

• the book does not study social phenomena as social. rather the authors make their own ontology a foregone conclusion, and so what they have to say about the nature of religion, history, economic and political phenomena is all downstream of that. it especially clusters around the unexamined and unhistoricized notion of "the natural"; everything seems to be understood as one or another deviation from it.
• "natural" vs "supernatural"
  • religion = the amalgamation of ideas, rituals, practices, symbols, identities, and institutions that humans collectively construct based upon their shared belief in the supernatural (p.9)
  • "faith in that which cannot be empirically proven, but is taken for granted by believers as real and true, is the distinguishing hallmark of religious life" (p.9)
    • bitter pill: empiricism is wrong. that is, we can't contrast knowledge gained by passively and patiently accepting sense impressions. reason 1: we construct knowledge using forms that precede any particular content (t. Kant), and those forms are not even humanly universal but historically conditioned (t. Foucault or whoever you'd prefer). reason 2: in the 12 links of conditioned arising, choices/habits (#2) precede the six senses (#5), because the sense-organs you have now are effects of your past deluded acts, and the knowledge they produce will be warped by delusion and desire until you work on yourself a lot (t. the Buddha). reason 3: the nervous system that conveys sense-impressions evolved first not for that purpose but to coordinate action, so again action and intent precedes knowledge (per a somewhat speculative paper i don't have on hand right now).
    • "faith" simply does not have the same relevance for everyone that it has for seculars and other christians. e.g. much buddhist epistemology has no qualms about subjecting its most cherished icons to deconstruction, calling them illusions, etc. the difference is that "physical" objects of knowledge receive the same treatment, and one is forced to make some kind of accomodation with structurally-necessary illusion. it's less credulous than secularism, not more. i don't think it's beyond criticism, or that Our Subjects get to fully decide the meaning of what they do, but you have to understand what the meaning for them is before you can come to any conclusions, and this foreign philosophical dogma doesn't even try to do that.
  • they contrast the "absurd" methods of solving a car problem by shamanic intervention and solving it by mechanic. "many people don’t know how either gas or electric cars work. But they do know that they don’t run on chi, blessings, or karma. And, most importantly, they know that someone knows how cars work." (p.23)
    • are they unaware that ritual experts exist? i don't have the specialized knowledge a mechanic claims to, but neither do i have the specialized knowledge a yinyang master or shaman does. it's my understanding of mechanics that they're about as likely to make something up to flimflam and upcharge you as a shaman is. going to a specialist vs using one's own understanding of a thing's principles of operation to solve a problem: both of these exist regardless of whether the system of explanation is what the authors would consider supernatural.
    • but i reject totally the idea that what distinguishes scientific knowledge systems from others is whether they are "natural." let's not talk about cars, but about the human body. does the human body run on yin and yang qi? does it run on the four humors? does it run on serotonin, dopamine, and estrogen? folk deployments of any of these ideas are, as far as i'm concerned, identical. qi is not "supernatural," it's just something Kasselstrand et al. don't believe in. if you listen to people talk about dopamine, you'll soon realize that their talk is by no means anchored in the latest scientific developments, it's just a borrowed name. and when it comes to psychology in particular, it would hardly improve things if it were: the history of the discipline is a succession of fad paradigms which each solve at max 1 problem, get total buy-in from practitioners, yet persist for far longer than reasonable.
    • what matters is that knowledge systems like psychology aspire to appear empirical, they aspire to epistemic hegemony, and in recent times (to reinterpret K et al.'s results) they have achieved an increasing measure of that hegemony. i'm not against taking seriously the difference between intellectually honest cultures of scientific inquiry, ones underpinned by hypocrisy, and ones with epistemic criteria wholly other than those of modern science—but as to why the plebs do or don't accept and employ the models a particular community of experts formulates, that's a wholly other sociological question, one of politics.
• "natural" vs "social" (or "social construct" and "physically real", p.31)
  • "existing independent of whether or not someone believes they are real" (p.31)
  • physical things are socially constructed. if everyone stopped believing that the musician Enya (their example) was real, she would no longer be a musician, as she would not be able to assume that role relative to us, and she would soon cease to be a human being, as she would be unable to make a living and feed herself. pyramids can only be pyramids because they entail a universe supporting people who can deem them pyramids.
  • Kuhnian point: most of the time, science is more concerned with whether propositions cohere with the prevailing paradigm than whether they fit "external" reality. it's only in times of paradigm crisis that a radical thought gets the chance to become the new axiom. this is the same phenomenon K et al. are talking about with "sacred canopies"! why is mormonism and even, apparently, marxism-leninism a sacred canopy subject to dissolution, yet a scientific paradigm is not?
• "natural" vs "artificial"
  • religion/secularism as natural or unnatural: K et al. are very concerned to show that secularism is not "unnatural." certainly i agree. but rather than rejecting the idea that particular ways of being human hold transhistorically (one of which might be "the right way"), they just want to be perennialists about secularism. they discuss Xunzi/Hsun Tzu (it seems they have been misled by differing romanizations into thinking that he is two people). but Xunzi did not argue "that there is no heaven other than this natural world and that morality is a social construct, with no divine component" (p.102). Xunzi said that one should not seek to understand the mechanisms of Heaven, but merely respond to it, and that the way for humans to harmonize with Heaven and Earth is to focus on human affairs. he upheld the authority of the ancient sages who established rituals. his arguments that ritual does not have mechanical effects on the cosmos are fascinating and unique, but we have to understand that he was theorizing why we do and should perform rituals, not criticizing them. it's just that his justification was formalist.
  • artificial religiosity/artificial secularization: K et al. characterize situations in which the state mandates religious adherence or non-adherence as "artificial," and thus temporary and incapable of contradicting their thesis. we can see here their unsupported political ontology. they think that "development" is a necessary process that takes place equally and separately in every national zone, of which secularization is only a corollary, and that the state is somehow not an integral part of the historical process but an interloper. neither do they understand capitalism as an integrated global phenomenon in which the state of affairs in one area might be intimately involved with those in another. we can see their political ontology also when they reject (p.167) "multiple secularities"/"many secularisms," arguing by comparison that "such language is not used to describe democracy even though democracy looks very different in" different places, "[i]t’s just different manifestations of democracy." beg to disagree!! where, physically, is the real "democracy" such that it can have "manifestations" in multiple places at once? does it astral project?

Praise

• i don't feel any need to dispute the basic thesis that in many places religiosity has been declining, and i don't find it hard to believe that some scholars would wrongly sidestep the quantitative issue by arguing for "change not decline" in ways that don't hold up

Open questions and paths forward

why do people choose to adopt scientific understandings of the world? what are the social benefits? how do scientific institutions assert hegemony, and how do people re-adapt scientific material?

Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”

• secularization: the process of decline of religious (= supernatural) belief, and the behavior/belonging centered around it. also the theory that describes that process
• the theory states that more modernized = more secularized. modernization here means "transition from a traditional, rural, non-industrial society to a contemporary, urban, industrial (or post-industrial) society" [Aristotle's natural slavery—incoherent definition, empty set]
• secularity: a quality of a person, the opposite of religiosity
• secularism: the term comes up occasionally as one type of conscious identification with secularity

seminar

• JB: (much as they suck,) we want to somehow quarantine their argument and extract what IS correct and under what circumstances
  • when a book is popular, you have to ask: why are people into this? do you know how many people have recommended me Sapiens?
• secularization=modernization=development=differentiation=rationalization
• week 1 19th cent secular activists, week 2 history, reads but doesn't cite crit theory, week 3 sociology of religion (critical theory), week 4 soc of religion (positivism, secular activism), week 5 polisci (liberalism), week 6 anthropology/anti-liberal critique, week 7(?) anthro/anti-lib, week 10 rgst

Author: José Casanova

Central research question:

what are the conditions of possibility for modern public religions?

Thesis or theses:

• religion is being "deprivatized" in the modern world and we have to rethink the secularization paradigm

Methods:

historical sociology

Summary of argument(s):

• resisting modern differentiation is what does result in religious decline
• the catholic church has made an about-face to resisting "authoritarianism" rather than allying with it, in the cases of spain, brazil, and poland. in the former two cases, this meant reconceiving its goals and function, using pressure from the top and abroad, linking with progressive/populist/lower-class elements, and breaking the hold of conservative clergy
• in poland under socialism, the church made itself the vehicle of nationalism, and linked itself with the solidarity movement. it pushed for democratization, but afterwards seems to have broken its leftist ties and uses its authority to block politicians from breaking ranks and gets abortion criminalized.
• in the US, immigrant ethnic catholicism has been eclipsed by this new official catholicism that wants to play by the american rules; there's finally been a vindication from above of the idea that american conditions (denominationalism, not being a Real Church) is not only an unfortunate situation that must be borne, but a boon that protects the church from state perversion so that it can get on with its business.
• US fundamentalist protestantism has been unable to maintain a posture of separation, instead getting sucked into a public realm where it has to sully itself with such activities as "giving reasons for what it believes" and "compromising politically."

Scholars the author is in conversation with:

• Weber, Durkheim, Habermas, other sociological(?) writers i don't recognize like David Martin

Criticism:

the book speaks from a place of easy liberalism: "we" = scholars, moderns, secular, liberal. i sort of imagine the author standing at the top of a tower surveying the world with hands clasped behind his back, graciously saying, "yes, we were too hasty to totally discount religion, we can let them back in to contribute to our beautiful public sphere." yes, it matters that the catholic church has made such a fundamental alteration in its self-conception. but my critical theory instincts want to say that this public sphere is based on certain intrinsic exclusions and dispossessions such that it doesn't matter to me whether buddhists and brahmins participate in reasoned debates at court to lend intellectual legitimacy and an air of the cosmopolitan to the king. Casanova has different investments in democracy, though.

Praise:

i found the major distinctions clarifying and the history new and interesting. overall, it made me more sympathetic to sociological theory.

Open questions and paths forward:

of course we can complain that the whole book is based on christian case studies. if religion isn't built around morality and salvation (chinese and japanese polytheisms), is it "private"? how does secularization theory relate to contexts where there was never an established church? what differentiates Casanova's modernity from those other, premodern historical contexts where the state did not ally itself to a single normative system and attempted to create room for their competition (as long as they didn't question its power)?

Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”:

breaks secularization down into 3 theses to evaluate separately

• differentiation of spheres, where assigning religion its own zone is just one case of the general process (this supposedly remains valid)
• decline of religious beliefs and practices, which clearly has only happened in certain places and circumstances
• marginalization of religion to a privatized sphere, which is what deprivatization resists

class

• "modern normative perspective" Casanova doesn't bother to define, takes as a baseline for measurement (Weberian ideal type style)
  • liberalism?
  • "desirable": what strengthens the public sphere of modern civil societies
• he gives us a good vocabulary for secularization thesis
• "y'all were like, this was a dull book" [i didn't think this]
• it's '94, he's not writing post-Asad. actually they were both at New School(?) but there's no reference. Casanova's only Islam reference is Iran, which Asad doesn't(?) write about much.
• as a grad student Mahmoud (Politics of Piety) gets in a debate with Stuart Hall in Cultural Studies about whether fundamentalism is modern or anti-modern. she calls him out for treating it as anti-modern, he's like "well, anti-modern is taking a position with respect to the modern, so ofc it's modern." they're ultimately disagreeing about whether a better future will come from those displaced by (M) or in (H) modernity.
• Susan Harding, "repugnant other," Book of Jerry Falwell ethnography on fundamentalism, inaugurated anthropology of Christianity, her most recent work is going in on secular people "making them" repugnant other, retired from UC Santa Cruz
• 3 kinds of secularization.
  • differentiation into separate spheres, of which religion is one
    • Weber's rationalization. working out according to its own logic. that's how you get the ideal type, objective benchmark. allows an easy slip between descriptive and prescriptive.
    • Bourdieu talks about fields instead of spheres. fields have their own institutions and interests.opower invested and people trained in certain ways of thinking.
    • me: he talks about "efficency" in realizing the proper functions of religion, which is crazy teleological; why not study only the "spheres" as they are conceived by particular actors, first, before mayybe testing it against "the inevitable"
    • JB: getting inside various perspectives is one of The Big Problems and i'd love to see how you handle it as you write more
  • privatization
    • out of the public sphere
    • Luhmann
  • decline of religiosity (JB's typology: belief/belonging/behavior)
    • a myth, an ideology engendered by the enlightenment, Feuerbach/Marx/Nietzsche, a part of the worldview We social scientists have inherited. we imagine an ideology to have increased because it's our own ideology.
    • 1950s the most christian the US has ever been
    • in the middle ages people weren't good christians; they didn't need to be: they were christians
    • does this include decline of "power"?
    • me: i think he's relabeling parts of what we used to call "decline" as differentiation/privatization because the word sounds nicer. he can go to the church and say, "we're not saying you have to decline, you just get a new function proper to you, which happens to mean you need to give up a lot of land"
    • JB: this sounds just like complementarian feminism lol
    • counting "heads, hearts, and minds of religious people" is what "ahistorical positivist sociology" has done, but it's a distraction
• religious origin?
• he uses "phenomenological" in what seems a weird way to me…"the phenomenological meaning of 'church'" in Xth century Y location
• church vs sect vs denomination
  • "as long as the church aspires to be a compulsory institution it is the different and changing nature of the stare that determines above all the different and changing nature of the church"(p.70)
• new age
• Marx, "On the Jewish Question": primary target is Bruno Bauer, who said jewish people should no longer follow ecclesiastic control. JB doesn't know abt Prussian Empire, but in Ottoman, they had a system of kinda self-governing ghettos. Bauer: they can have a private jewish identity but have to be publicly secular. Marx says as long as there's a private jewishness, there's still gonna be a state, which you're affirming publicly.
  • Casanova would say Marx is arguing for decline and end of differentiation against privatization. basically the same as a theocracy (lol).
  • Leninist state atheism according to Casanova's durkheimian perspective is a failure since religion pops right back up.
• "unfortunately most of the great histories of atheism have been written by Hegelian Catholics: Mark Taylor, Charles Buckley, Without God Without Creed by James Turner…"
• when Phil Gorski gives his seminar he'll want us to read a couple chapters of A Secular Age. he's a hardcore Durkheimian.
• Casanova keeps talkign abt public/private…but nowadays we maybe live in a "publics world" in how we think about it anyway…publcs and counter-publics…
• meanings of public and private. we don't have a commons. who owns the "public" spaces?
  • conscience as property, the first freedom in america: Finbarr Curtis, The Production of American Religious Freedom
  • influencers…selling of one's interiority
  • what are the implications for secularization of our public media being owned by multinationals? "the church controls the media" is different from a company owns the media?

Central research question:

how can historical and anthropological examples involving religion make us rethink, in a more circumspect way than modern political though habitually supposes, the meaning of sovereignty?

Thesis or theses

• >What we call “religion” or the “sacred” encompasses the dynamic interplay between a normative order and the drive to go beyond this order, either to escape or to legitimate it.(p.8)

Methods

• "history of religions." lots of rereading of secondary sources, and some original interpretations of intellecual-history type texts and the hebrew bible.

Summary of argument(s)

• (ch.1) Yelle defends the schmittian homology between the sovereign's ability to determine exceptions that suspend the ordinary function of law, and God's omnipotence that can contravene laws of nature and moral principles. a certain lawlessness is a principle internal to any system of law, and in fact is posited as the source of law. this also becomes visible in periods of interregnum (looking at Agamben), when sovereignty returns to the people(?) and in some cultures they go total thepurge mode, and in carnivalistic inversions. [see also the demonic inversion built into the chinese calendar per Feuchtwang?]
• (ch.2) following Schmitt, deism represents an important evacuation of God's exceptional power: no longer is he taken to exercise his omnipotence in intervening in the rules he originally set up. Schmitt (catholic nazi) criticizes Weber's routinization of charisma thesis for being a typical protestant deterioration-into-legalism narrative. Schmitt's exceptional sovereign is bringing potentia absoluta back in, it's catholic-scholastic. other theological precedents to Weber's charisma are the supercession of mosaic law, the cessation of charismata, unveiling of jewish mysteries, silence of the oracles. disenchantment is a classic christian mytheme, so Weber's account of it as real history is hardly theologically neutral; it's a specifically christian problem.
• (ch.3) Agamben claims that sovereignty is a separate thing from sacrifice and the sacred, and that the sacred is ambivalent (refers to both despised and elevated things), but he's plain wrong on the first count and the second isn't super meaningful (e.g. taboo means prohibited generally and therefore include positive and negative forms). ban, ḥerem, the founding act of violence in appropriating land to found a polity…this is what we have at the beginning of sovereignty rather than a state of nature.
• (ch.4) ḥerem violates economic rationality by destroying shit for 0 gain, and the Mishnah is structured around taboos imposed on the productive economy, see also potlatches and chinese buddhist festivals; religion institutes a second, salvific economy. ascetics' visible non-subjection to ordinary social and biological imperatives indexes their existence beyond it, as unconditional=sovereign.
• (ch.5) the lockean/ameriKKKan attitude to land absolutely denies its sacrality, and the legitimacy of anyone who can see its sacrality, in favor of the imperative to work it, dice it up and bring it all under the plow. the biblical requirement to periodically leave land fallow cannot be assimilated to any rational-ecological logic, and the debt jubilee also returns us beyond the productive economy and equalizes social positions. the basis of inequality is the storage economy, and antipathy to this is attested in the biblical manna mechanic and the Aggañña Sutta's account of social origins.
• (ch.6) a general human tendency to rebel against the monetary reckoning of salvation is exhibited in Luther's reaction to indulgences and the śramaṇa movement against vedic sacrifice.

Scholars the author is in conversation with

• Schmitt, Agamben, Graeber, Weber, Blumenberg, Bataille, Veblen

Criticism

• this feels like a very old-style mode of anthropological thinking, where we're going to discover some kind of universal functions of societies, and then when we reach the stage of having discovered "a nice idea," we quit, instead of trying to dissolve that idea in acid
• in a throwback you wouldn't expect to still be possible, the book participates fully in the Mauss/Bataille style critique of utilitarianism. by now, haven't we moved beyond criticizing and made much better tools for describing what people do, so that we can ignore the economists?

Praise

this seems like the best starting reference for approaching the problems of Agamben and Blumenberg?

Open questions and paths forward

• the big thing i see missing in this kind of western thought on sovereignty compared to chinese examples is the ability for power to flow upwards instead of downwards. can the power to innovate be grounded in sucessful internalization of transmitted law? confucianism and buddhism would say yes.
• Yelle ends by saying that by discovering the identity of religion and sovereignty, we've revealed an "exit sign" from modernity(=what?) for our thought

Author’s understanding of secularism and other key terms

• absolute power (potentia or potestas dei absoluta) and ordered/orderly power (potentia ordinata): God's capacity to alter natural laws and the past vs following rules he set down himself
• secularism means the post-protestant or post-deist political world which believes it has expunged the need for sacrificial violence (more likely simply disavows its violence)
• religion = sacred = sovereignty: "the goal of this book has been to reread the historical archive so as to reveal that what we call religion is an anamorphosis, a distorted image that can be seen properly only from a particular perspective, from which it reveals its true form, as sovereignty"(p.187)

Author: Leigh Eric Schmidt

Central research question:

who were religious secularists, what were they trying to do, and did they succeed?

Thesis or theses:

starting in the second half of the twentieth century, the american right has used the menace of a dominating "secular humanist religion" to characterize efforts to e.g. end school-mandated christian activities. though it been repudiated by the contemporary secular humanists, there was a historical sub-tendency within secularism which desired to constitute a "religion of humanity" teaching moral values of humanism and rational inquiry in a context which mirrored the churches, weekly services, sunday schools, feelings, and sometimes rituals of christianity. however, this minor impulse within the secularist movement always occupied a contradictory position, and its congregations never endured more than a handful of years, so its characterization by the right is ridiculous.

Methods:

historical, cites a lot of literature produced by secularists and newspapers

Summary of argument(s):

• secularism repeatedly surfaces phenomena that rhyme with religious ones, something it handles with a mix of discomfort and irony: hence the search for Paine's relic-bones, which like those of any saint have a tendency to multiply and have transformative effects on those who encounter them
• although it was in fact Comte who coined the concept of a "religion of humanity," and though Paine's much-repeated ostensible motto, "the world is my country and to do good is my religion," was an offhand remark without such importance to him, still Thomas Paine was the man who achieved the most consistent canonization as a secularist hero and man of wisdom
• funeral services were an important area of contestation for freethinkers: there was great pressure, especially from christian family members, for a christian burial, and once you were dead it was very difficult to ensure anyone followed your wishes not to have priestly heaven-talk as your body was laid in the dirt. secularists wrote, promoted and circulated ritual guides for funeral services (not to mention marriages) and sermons that showed a way of surveying a life from its end without putting it in the context of the christian life-path and afterlife.
• in the 20th century, we could say that the wish of religious secularists for secularism to be a viable alternative to christianity had some success, thanks to legal judgments that expanded the recognition of legitimate conscience to include forms not based on a supreme being
• this and the bogeymanization of religious secularism by the right have given the idea of religious secularism a place in consciousness and discourse at exactly the same time as religious secularism, which was never more than a spark in the first place, largely fizzled out
• however, the smothering of that middle by those on either side who wish to draw a sharp line between religion and secularism is at the same time a friction which continues to generate sparks as even in our century some individuals attempt to negotiate a compromise

Scholars the author is in conversation with:

• notes to introduction discuss Charles Taylor, Talal Asad et al. who are interested in secularism as a Real Thing, but who she really positions herself with is others studying "lived, material, and embodied forms of deism, secularism, humanism, freethought, agnosticism, and atheism"(p.200–201) historically/ethnographically

Criticism:

i felt there was little attention given to social context and explanation, and that the book didn't really justify why the phenomena it describes are important, especially when they're repeatedly described as fringe, small, failed projects, whose "millenarian" outlook is fanciful. the dramatis personae are all liberal white american settlers, yes? what kinds of limits does that put on their projects?

Praise:

i definitely found intrinsic interest in the stories of these small experimental congregations; there's a lot of texture. reading about Katie Kehm Smith i was gripped and maybe smitten, i yelled NOOO when she died in 1895 at the age of 27. may she rest in DIRT and the FOND MEMORIES of the LIVING (heaven isn't real, you idiots).

Open questions and paths forward:

are both the existence of religious secularism and its fringeness, hated by both those more christian and those more atheist, somehow inevitable results of a shared paradigm of religion? does 19th/20th century religious secularism have anything to say to contemporary secularism besides "i was a failure and it's a relief i was eventually suppressed"?

Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”:

Schmidt isn't interested in e.g. the thesis that secularization is a real process in society; rather what she talks about is the ascription of ther terms secular and secularism, especially their self-ascription. that's the framing of the book: we have these rightists ascribing secularism to something they claim to see, and she moves to look at who it is that really self-ascribes it (in this particular "religious" way).

Title and author

Secularism, Scepticism, and Atheism. Verbatim Report of the Proceedings of a Two Nights Public Debate Between Messrs. G.J. Holyoake & C. Bradlaugh

Central research question: N/A

Thesis or theses:

• The principles of secularism do not include atheism (Holyoake)
• Secularism cannot be distinguished from atheism (Bradlaugh)
• Secular criticism does not involve scepticism (Holyoake)
• Secular criticism requires scepticism toward theology (Bradlaugh)

Methods:

Transciption of public debate

Summary of argument(s):

• H: We need to distinguish the positive and self-sufficient project of investigating moral truths from mere negation of theistic premises
• B: Those who have swallowed Christianity will take as an attack the assertion of secularism and will attack back; they're more clear-eyed than you
• H: God, the hereafter, &c., constitute a domain beyond that we have access to, and so we can found secularism on disinterest in that issue.
• B: What H characterizes as a region of epistemic unverifiability is in fact one of semantic incoherence. Following Spinoza—the idea of an existence, a substance other than the single one that is our world falls apart under any logical scrutiny. The issue can't be absolutely quarantined and so we can't allow people to have wrong opinons about God.
• H: People like B and like Owen think they need to sweep the world clear of all error before they can go about making anything.
• B: You can't make anything without also being engaged in clearing error.
• H: Theology is fine as long as it keeps to its own department, hell we can have a Department of Howling
• B: I will not countenance a Department of Howling

Scholars the author is in conversation with: N/A

Criticism/praise

In retrospect i find it easy to say that Holyoake is correct to fight for a change of ground to science and social improvement and simply ignore Christianity as it will be shown to be useless. Bradlaugh comes off as having missed the point rather; isn't the goal precisely to not have to argue over something so silly as whether it's plausible that Samson killed a thousand men with that jawbone? Holyoake is especially right to point out the closeness of liberal Christians, who are not the same thing as the clergy, as potential allies. However I understand how Bradlaugh can have the feeling that Holyoake's "ignoring" is a meaningless gesture of shutting eyes to real political persecution. This kind of dilemma around defining the terms of debate happens any time one's position is a stigmatized minority one.

Open questions and paths forward: N/A

Author’s understanding of “secular, secularism, secularization, or secularity”:

For Holyoake: Secularism is big-tent scientific progressive utilitarianism which focuses on "this world" through the evidence of the senses and and is uninterested in (theological) questions outside it.

For Bradlaugh: Secularism just is atheism. The clergy have propositions about how to live this life which they justify metaphysically and therefore to do combat with them with regard to the former issue requires engaging completely with the latter.