Secularism and Secular People

Blankholm, Joseph

doi:10.1215/08992363-4310874

Cited by 31 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…We can add these varieties of secular discourse to the positivism, Marxism, pragmatism, and phenomenology I have already mentioned. There is no one true secularism, and oddly enough, secular people are so religiously ambiguous that even American law considers them both secular and religious (Blankholm 2018). Secular people's ambivalent relationship with religion tells an important story.…”

Section: The Ambiguity Of the Secular Conditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Feeling out alternatives within secularity

Blankholm

2021

Religion

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This essay reassembles many of the key points in the thematic issue 'Anthropology Within and Without the Secular Condition' to create a coherent picture of the fragments that comprise secularity and secularism. Understanding what secularism often affirms, such as a materialist ontology and an empiricist epistemology, makes it easier to recognize the vast diversity within the secular discursive tradition. Exploring this internal diversity is important for giving a better account of the secular condition and for finding alternatives to the most common ways of being secular, which have become worthy objects of critique. This essay then looks more closely at two aspects of the secular that are usually overlooked: a poetic language ideology and the locus of explanatory satisfaction. A better understanding of what it means to be secular, in all its variety, will help scholars better control for the ways in which secular discourse shapes their feelings and the knowledge they desire to produce.

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Section: The Ambiguity Of the Secular Conditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We should be just as skeptical of a strategy that groups all that is awful under the sign of the secular. It hardly differs from attempts by evangelical Christians to make "secular humanism" their bogeyman and political enemy (Toumey 1993;Blankholm 2017;Greenberg 2020;Schmitt 2007).…”

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confidence: 97%

Feeling out alternatives within secularity

Blankholm

2021

Religion

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“…Similarly, Joseph Blankholm notes that the particular notion of secularism discussed by Talal Asad (2003) and Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (2000, 2008) only looks at how it centres on ‘prohibiting religion from certain spaces’ and ‘privileging specific ways of being religious’ (2018, 245). Genealogical investigations of the secular have in fact shown ‘how secular people’s belief-centered approach to (non) religious identity is in part a product of a distinctly Protestant and American form of secularism…though its deeper origins lie in colonialist and broader Christian conceptions of religion’ (Blankholm 2018: 246). Rather than seeing secularization as an inevitable process of privatization of religion in the face of modernization, more recently scholars emphasize geographically differentiated processes in which societies embrace certain aspects that might fall into the category of the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’.…”

Section: Religions and Secularismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religious tolerance: A view from China

Tarocco

2019

Philosophy & Social Criticism

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European and North American cultures are awash in stereotypes about religion. The recently published volume Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés (2017) tackles several of these and shows why scholars find them to be clichéd. By describing their origins and elucidating the social or political work they rhetorically accomplish in the present, the authors of the volume address some important clichés, namely, that religions are belief systems, that religion is a private matter or that it exclusively concerns the transcendent. In the same way, scholars of religion in the Chinese speaking world find themselves often having to dispel the many myths that surround it. Does China have religion? What does it look like? And where does it stand vis-à-vis religious tolerance? In this short article, I take a comparative look at the late imperial period in China and the substantive changes that took place at the end of it. What does religious tolerance-and its opposite-mean in the context of China's modern epistemic order?

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“…The complexities of characterizing different unaffiliated groups, or “nones,” has been noted by many researchers of religion (cf. Ammerman ; Blankholm ; Cotter ; Day, Vincent, and Cotter ; Lim, Putnam, and MacGregor ; Zuckerman et al. ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Irreligion: Christian Deconversion in an Online Community

Starr

Waldo

Kauffman

2019

Scientific Study of Religion

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What is the role of the Internet in a possible trend toward secularization in the United States? This case study seeks to elucidate the process of online deconversion by examining religious exit narratives (called "extimonies" by participants) as posted in a forum for ex-Christians from 2005 to 2017. Echoing Mauss and Ebaugh, deconverts on the site went through a role exit involving a three-part, but intertwined, intellectual, emotional, and social process. The online community provided an interactional space for them to construct and practice new secular identities, to explore doubts and process emotions arising from the deconversion process, and to prepare themselves for offline interactions with believers. This case study also suggests that the Internet and online communities may provide spaces for the highly religiously committed to explore deconversion and role alternatives.

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Secularism and Secular People

Cited by 31 publications

References 34 publications

Feeling out alternatives within secularity

Feeling out alternatives within secularity

Religious tolerance: A view from China

Digital Irreligion: Christian Deconversion in an Online Community

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