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Secular

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2023

Sebastian Lecourt Open the ORCID record for Sebastian Lecourt [Opens in a new window]
Sebastian Lecourt*
Affiliation:
University of Houston, Texas, United States
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Abstract

This essay argues that secular is an important keyword for Victorian studies because it foregrounds the particularity of universal concepts. Victorian narratives of secularization and colonial regimes of religious toleration can all be shown to have roots in the Protestant conception of religion as private individual belief and voluntary association. They therefore raise the question of how and whether such political conceptions might transcend their particularist origins. To make this point I begin by exploring the difference between secularism and secularization as critical terms. I then suggest how the recent wave of work on secularism has illuminated the link between the two—namely, by showing how attempts to imagine a secular world in fact depend upon specific ideas of what religion is and where it belongs.

Type
Keywords Redux
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , Fall 2023 , pp. 501 - 504
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Notes

1. For overviews of secularism, secularization, and related terms, see Gorski, Philip and Altınordu, Ateş, “After Secularization?” Annual Review of Sociology 34 (2008): 55–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pecora, Vincent, Secularization and Cultural Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1– 66Google Scholar.

2. On secularism and Holyoake, see Royle, Edward, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

3. “Secularism: Its Sphere and Service,” The Reasoner 14.3 (Jan. 19, 1853), 33 (emphasis original).

4. For a familiar synthesis of these stories, see Chadwick, Owen, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Key studies in this vein include Houghton, Walter E., The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–70 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Miller, J. Hillis, The Disappearance of God (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; and Cockshut, A. O. J., The Unbelievers (New York: NYU Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

6. See Tylor, E. B., Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1871), 2:373Google Scholar.

7. The germinal study here remains Talal Asad's Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

8. Mahmood, Saba, “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 323–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. See Anidjar, Gil, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 56 – 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Scott, J. Barton, Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Werner, Winter Jade, Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021)Google Scholar.