Abstract
This chapter is an attempt to think about secularization through the heterodox strains in religion, in such a way as to push back the history of secularism to a point before the consolidation of mainstream world religions. I contend that a focus on heterodoxies in religion complicates a straightforward binary opposition between secularism and religion and promotes a long view of history in which the heterogeneous fragments comprising religious formations are illuminated, leading to questions that challenge a chronology of secularism based on a narrative that reads the diminishing place of religion in public life as the catalyst for a secular outlook.
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Notes
Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society (London: Watts, 1966).
See Philip Gorski, “Historicizing the Secularization Debate: Church, State, and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca. 1300–1700,” American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (2000): 138–167.
See Gorski as well as Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971)
Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History, and Identity (London: Penguin, 2005), 12.
Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Simon During, “Literary Subjectivity,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 31, no. 1–2 (2000): 45.
Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 409.
Vincent Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 23.
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 362.
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
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© 2010 Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
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Viswanathan, G. (2010). Secularism and Heterodoxy. In: Cady, L.E., Hurd, E.S. (eds) Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106703_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106703_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38327-6
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