Secularism in Antebellum America

Almighty God and the Almighty Dollar: The Study of Religion and Market Economies in the United States

“…Through examining Oprah as both a model consumer and product for others to consume, Lofton explores the ways in which Protestant esthetics of choice and self‐betterment have both permeated and been permeated by consumer culture to the extent that consumer choice may itself be seen as an extension of Protestant piety. John Lardas Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America () situates the market revolution as one of a multitude of forces that shaped the ‘metaphysics of secularism’ in the 19th‐century U.S. (Modern , p. 10). Arguing that secularism is not the absence of religion but rather a mode of understanding, discussing, and enacting concepts of ‘true religion’, Modern explores how the market revolution enabled ‘particular ways of being religious’ for American Protestants (Modern , p. 9).…”

“…John Lardas Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America () situates the market revolution as one of a multitude of forces that shaped the ‘metaphysics of secularism’ in the 19th‐century U.S. (Modern , p. 10). Arguing that secularism is not the absence of religion but rather a mode of understanding, discussing, and enacting concepts of ‘true religion’, Modern explores how the market revolution enabled ‘particular ways of being religious’ for American Protestants (Modern , p. 9). Protestants both adopted market practices in their various evangelical enterprises and reimagined market practices as fundamentally religious in nature: a ‘pure circulation’ of spirit, a ‘moral economy’ rather than a financial one (Modern , p. 93).…”

“…Arguing that secularism is not the absence of religion but rather a mode of understanding, discussing, and enacting concepts of ‘true religion’, Modern explores how the market revolution enabled ‘particular ways of being religious’ for American Protestants (Modern , p. 9). Protestants both adopted market practices in their various evangelical enterprises and reimagined market practices as fundamentally religious in nature: a ‘pure circulation’ of spirit, a ‘moral economy’ rather than a financial one (Modern , p. 93). There are tinges of Weber's Protestant Ethic here, but the ending has shifted: Protestantism no longer prepares the world for industrial capitalism before politely fading away; now, Protestant sensibilities are further entrenched in American culture via a consumer capitalism that denies its own religiosity.…”

The study of American religions: critical reflections on a specialization

“…Dramatic pronouncements about the irreducibility of the sacred have come under fire, however, for performing ideological work that deflected attention from the social and political contexts within which world religions were invented as apolitical traditions (Fitzgerald 2000;Masuzawa 2005;McCutcheon 1997). Recent postcolonial theorists, for example, have taken issue with secular liberalism's Protestant bias toward belief that neglects practical or ritual dimensions of religious life, its pretense to an impossible neutrality, its naiveté about institutional power and social inequality, its reproduction of colonial categories that privilege modern secularism over barbaric religious fundamentalism, its introduction of intolerant and exclusive models of religion in place of more fluid spiritual practices, its reliance on a semiotic ideology that normalizes dematerialized conceptions of language and truth, its valorization of private freedom at the expense of public institutions, its misplaced confidence in the disenchanting power of enlightenment reason, and its role in establishing the self-evidence of an epistemic logic and aesthetic sensibility that privileges certainty, calculability, and rationality in the formation and disciplining of modern subjects (Asad 2003;Curtis 2011b;Fessenden 2006;Hurd 2008;Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008;Keane 2007;Modern 2011;Nandy 2002;Wenger 2009). Some argue that religious studies is still too beholden to religion to allow for fully secular study, and would continue to lament the failure to live up to Bruce Lincoln's dictum that 'Reverence is a religious, and not a scholarly virtue' (Lincoln 1996: 226).…”

Obeah and its others: buffered selves in the era of tropical medicine

“…The dream of secularity is (to apply John Lardas Modern's phrase), to render the secular a "ponderous and formidable materiality," including disciplinary attempts to manage the porous materiality of the body. 41 This dream thus depends on an unceasing relocation of enchantments, in this case onto African religious practices away from the devastating transformations of diseases like the yaws. But to return to Bruno Latour's definition of "belief" -that moderns believe in the distinction between fetish and fact but do not adhere to it in practice -we see that pattern likewise in accounts of obeah in relation to Western medicine and technology at the turn of the nineteenth century.…”