Secularismpdf

Introduction

The anthropology of secularism explores how modern nation-states construct and manage religion. The idea that states administer religion departs from the scholarly common sense of the past century. This perspective holds that religion in modern societies should be set off from the state and from much of public life, both as a matter of proper governance and in terms of the practicalities of everyday life.

Early thinkers of the modern social sciences laid the groundwork for the assumption that secularisation would accompany modernisation. Thinkers as ideologically diverse as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, James Frazer, Edward B. Tylor, Émile Durkheim, Auguste Comte, and Max Weber all shared this view (Casanova 1994, 17). In their work, secularisation could involve four related but distinct processes: (1) an overall decline or disappearance of religious belief and practice within a society; (2) the disentanglement of once-fused dimensions of social life (such as the state, economics, and religion) into autonomous domains, each governed by its own rules, norms, institutions, and rationalities; (3) the privatisation of religion within its own domain (Casanova 1994, 19–39); and (4) the state’s impartiality towards religion, an arrangement based either on the principle of separating religion and the state, or on the state’s neutrality regarding religious matters.

Later scholars’ embrace of the idea that secularisation and modernisation go hand in hand was not simply a matter of dogmatic acceptance. For much of the twentieth century, developments in many parts of the world appeared to confirm this theory. Church attendance declined markedly in many Western countries; fewer people chose to work in religious professions; in surveys, more people self-identified as non-believers; and religious affiliation was no longer a prerequisite for holding state office or joining major political parties. However, during the late 1970s, a series of dramatic events began to upend these expectations: The Islamic Revolution shook Iran, a conservative Christian lobbying group called ‘the Moral Majority’ emerged in the United States, and Liberation Theology, which holds that the Christian gospel should inspire political and economic reforms that benefit the poor, helped catalyse the Nicaraguan Revolution (Casanova 1994).

Some scholars dismissed these cases as aberrations, fleeting surges of religious enthusiasm that would soon peter out. Far from fading, such reconfigurations of the state and religion have only become more apparent in recent years: in 2019, India’s Citizenship Amendment Bill granted amnesty to religious minorities from neighbouring countries, so long as they are not Muslims; in 2020, soon after ordering the violent dispersal of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters from the grounds of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., US President Donald Trump arrived at the site and triumphantly hoisted a Bible over his head; in 2021 Sara Zemmahi, a candidate from French president Emmanuel Macron’s party, was barred from running in a local election because she wore a hijab in a campaign poster. As the result of such developments, two conclusions have become increasingly evident: religion is neither disappearing nor taking its assigned place in the private sphere, and scholars need to rethink their assumptions about religion and the modern world.

The anthropology of secularism utilises the discipline’s theoretical insights and ethnographic methods to better understand this moment, in which the secularisation thesis no longer offers a compelling account of the complex interplay between religion and the state—and, as this research increasingly shows, probably never did. As part of this effort, scholars in the subfield have developed a set of conceptual distinctions between four concepts: secularisation, the secular, secularity, and secularism. Within this literature, these terms have specific meanings that often diverge from their usage in everyday conversation, popular media, and even other academic contexts. While this entry focuses specifically on the anthropological literature related to the final term—secularism—a brief overview of the other three will help clarify its scope.

‘Secularisation’ points to the previously dominant narrative of religion’s inevitable decline and withdrawal into the private sphere. It is the set of ideas that early anthropological thinkers advanced and which the anthropology of secularism critically re-examines (Schröder 2011, 44).

‘The secular’ describes a foundational way of conceptualising and experiencing the world, one that structures much of modern life and encompasses broad assumptions about what exists, what forces shape history, how the world is divided and categorised, how one should comport oneself, and how to relate to others. Specifically, the secular involves assuming that nature, culture, and the supernatural are distinct realms; that humans are the primary agents of history; and that the existence of supernatural entities is recognised as disputed rather than being taken for granted. Religiousness is here often framed as a matter of individuals' private beliefs.

For those who inhabit this framework, the secular appears as a given, part of the very fabric of reality. Scholars working in this subfield often challenge its presumed givenness, demonstrating that reality is a historically contingent formation, shaped by multiple intersecting histories, religious and otherwise (Asad 2003, 25). They further highlight that treating the world as secular enables and constrains ‘very different possibilities for acting and being’ (Asad 2003, 73). Secular societies may, for example, try to reduce pain in healthcare, rather than channelling it along religiously appropriate lines (Asad 2003). Importantly, the secular does not necessarily exclude religion. A tradition such as liberal Protestantism, which envisions an unbridgeable divide between the supernatural and the mundane—where otherworldly agents do not intervene in social or natural affairs—remains firmly within the secular.

‘Secularity’ denotes a worldview that exists alongside, or even in tension with, religious orientations. It comprises a set of ‘concepts, norms, sensibilities, and dispositions’ (Mahmood 2016, 3) that privilege empirical evidence, reason, and skepticism as the proper means for understanding and otherwise engaging with the world. A growing body of anthropological scholarship investigates the diverse forms that secularity takes today, including humanist, rationalist, irreligious, and nonreligious orientations (Schulz and Binder 2023).

‘Secularism’, as most anthropologists use the term, designates modern nation-states’ production and regulation of religion as a category, institutional formation, and lived experience. Understood in this way, secularism is not simply the retreat of religion from public life, but an active and dynamic form of governance. It encompasses ‘[t]he complex of laws, judicial rulings, policies, institutions and ideologies that directly and indirectly govern religion within a nation-state’ (Harding 2019, 49). Such governance often operates by establishing a ‘spectrum of religious normativity’ (Harding 2019, 49), elevating forms of religiosity considered appropriate and beneficial, while restricting or attempting to remake those seen as behind the times, excessive, or socially destabilising. In addition, secularism also functions by drawing and enforcing a boundary between religion and the state, continually renegotiating the line between them, a process that has far-reaching consequences for ‘how essential freedoms are identified, selves and their motives are defined, and ways of life can be lived’ (Agrama 2012, 27).

The notion that the modern state plays a central role in shaping religion may seem counterintuitive. After all, traditions such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam existed long before the emergence of the nation-state. How, then, could the modern state take part in shaping something as seemingly ancient as religion? Making sense of this requires us to distinguish between the vast diversity of practices and experiences that existed within and between these traditions over millennia and the more uniform, belief-centred, privatised mode they have assumed over the past two centuries. It is this latter configuration that scholars in the anthropology of secularism have in mind when they refer to ‘religion’.

This modern transformation of religion is often attributed to impersonal forces such as industrialisation, urbanisation, and the dissemination of scientific knowledge (Harding 2021, 311), or to enlightened policies that ostensibly severed ties between religion and the state, thereby ending centuries of religious conflict. While the anthropology of secularism does not entirely reject such accounts, it emphasises the fact that a privatised, belief-centred conception of religion emerged from situated and interested political struggles (McLeod 2000, 28–9). By examining concrete contests over the social purviews of religion and the state, anthropology denaturalises the purported neutrality of secularism and fosters skepticism about its consequences, especially for marginalised and colonised peoples.

The critique of ‘religion’

The critique of religion as a universal category was a crucial precursor to the anthropology of secularism—and is therefore worth considering in detail. Only by recognising that religion is not a given in the way of things could anthropologists begin to ask how it was historically and discursively constructed (Asad 1993). This scholarship challenged anthropology’s long-standing assumption that religion is fundamentally a matter of belief.

Universal, belief-centred conceptions of religion stretch back at least as far as E.B. Tylor’s definition of religion as ‘the belief in Spiritual Beings’ (1871, 383, emphasis added). They are also evident in the claim that, ‘[t]he basic axiom underlying what we may perhaps call “the religious perspective” is everywhere the same: he who would know must first believe’ (Geertz 1973, 110, emphasis added). The word ‘first’ here is especially significant. In this framework, belief differs from other forms of knowledge because it rests on a ‘prior acceptance of authority’ (Geertz 1973, 109). For example, a conservative Christian might insist that God created the first two people, Adam and Eve. Within this framework, because this idea is not rooted in first-hand experience, but rather in a ‘prior acceptance’ of biblical authority, it should be classified as a ‘belief’. Geertz further characterises the religious perspective through a contrast with another ostensibly universal perspective, the common-sensical. This orientation is described as ‘a simple acceptance of the world, its objects, and its processes as being just what they seem to be… [that is grounded in]] the pragmatic motive, the wish to act upon the world so as to bend it to one’s practical purposes’ (Geertz 1973, 111).

Two central matters make such a universal definition of religion untenable. First, the ‘constituent elements and relationships’ of what we tend to call ‘religions’, ‘are historically specific’ (Asad 1993, 29). Second, any definition of religion ‘is itself [a] historical product’ (Asad 1993, 29). The first point echoes one of anthropology’s most fundamental insights: throughout time and across cultures, social worlds have been organised in diverse ways, making overly broad generalisations about them difficult to sustain. This becomes clear when considering times and places in which the supposed boundary between the religious and the common-sensical could not be neatly disentangled, such as in twelfth-century Catholic Europe (Asad 1993, 47). At that time, the Church permeated everyday life. It taxed communities, lent money to the state, administered education, ran its own courts, cared for the sick, and documented births, marriages, and deaths. In such a context, religious knowledge was not so clearly based on ‘a prior acceptance of authority’ but was acquired in the course of practical activities and guided by a ‘pragmatic motive’ (Geertz 1973, 111), as when someone sought healing at a Church-run hospital or paid taxes. What is more, carrying out such actions required ‘a simple acceptance of the world, its objects, and its processes as being just what they seem to be’ (1973, 111).

The second point—that any universal definition of religion ‘is itself [a] historical product’ (Asad 1993, 29)—is once again rooted in a familiar anthropological insight: concepts are constructed, not a given in the way of things. The modern meaning of religion took shape as the state and science increasingly laid claim to the authority, bureaucracies, and sites of knowledge production that had once fallen under the purview of the Church. Stripped of these more everyday and institutional elements, belief—often a Protestant-inflected mode of belief—became ‘the only legitimate space’ remaining as the basis for Christianity (Asad 1993, 45). Anthropologists inherited this belief-centred formulation of religion and then projected it onto diverse traditions when they went into the field.

Definitions of religion that rely on a sharp division between religious and everyday life falter when confronted with contemporary forms of social life that resist such compartmentalisation. In Cairo, a women’s mosque movement rejects attempts to recast Islam as ‘an abstract system of beliefs that has no bearing on the practicalities of daily living’ (Mahmood 2005, 4, emphasis added). Instead, participants strive to align ‘the practical chores of daily living’ (2005, 126, emphasis added) with Islamic principles. For them, efforts to detach Islam from everyday practices are a nefarious form of ‘secularization’ or ‘westernization’ (2005, 4).

Attention to the law further illustrates how religion is rendered a matter of belief. In the legal case of Warner v. Boca Raton in the United State, inhabitants of the city Boca Raton in Florida placed handmade religious memorials—'statues, crosses, Stars of David, candles, fences, plantings, and marble chips’ (Sullivan 2018, 18)—on loved ones’ graves at the municipal cemetery. Local authorities demanded their removal, citing cemetery regulations that required memorials ‘do not extend vertically above the ground and [be] constructed of approved metal or stone’ (Sullivan 2018, 17). In response, family members sued, claiming that such constraints infringed on their constitutional right to the free exercise of religion.

The judge in the case ultimately ruled against the plaintiffs. He concluded that the memorials did not qualify as ‘an exercise of religion’ because they did not ‘reflect… a larger system of religious beliefs’ (Sullivan 2018, 97, emphasis added) and instead amounted to ‘purely personal preference’ (Sullivan 2018, 98). This reasoning reflects the Protestant-inflected history of US law, which defines religion as a matter of belief. Within this framework, embodied or material practices are relegated to the category of ‘lived religion’, a marked and ostensibly inferior form of religiosity that is ‘systematically excluded, both rhetorically and legally, from modern public space’ (Sullivan 2018, 8). The ruling thus highlights a secular tendency to privilege belief-centred religion over other forms.

State management of religion

Given that religion is not a universal or transhistorical concept, the anthropology of secularism highlights the central role of modern nation-states in constructing and regulating religion as a category and lived experience. Indeed, for many anthropologists, this process—the state’s crafting of religion—is secularism (Asad 2003).

Nineteenth-century liberalism was a critical component of this history. Liberals saw the broad authority of religious institutions as obstructing a set of interconnected reforms they sought to enact: cultivating a rational and homogeneous citizenry, promoting national identity, and consolidating state power. They charged that religious officials’ corruption and attachment to tradition led them to mismanage the essential social functions that they directed, such as aid for the poor and healing the sick. Seeking to remedy these perceived failures, liberal administrations began to appropriate these functions into the state apparatus and integrate them into their broader strategies for national governance. State control of mass education was regarded as vital to this transformation. Liberals believed that religious schooling fostered superstition and loyalty to the faith rather than the nation. They argued that state-run schools would instead form rational citizens endowed with essential skills and loyalty to the nation.

Liberals also insisted that the multiple corporate communities be unified into a single national community. For instance, at the time of the French Revolution, Jews maintained their own binding legal system (halacha), paid special taxes, were barred from owning land, and faced significant restrictions on their occupations and places of residence. With the revolution, Jews were granted citizenship as individuals. They became subject to the unified French legal system, paid the same taxes as gentiles, participated in commercial life without formal constraints, and were now included—at least officially—within the national community, ‘the people of France’. Jewishness was redefined from a comprehensive way of life into a ‘religion’, and Jewish law was recast as a matter of ‘individual, optional, and private practice’ (Fernando 2014, 112). In public, Jews ostensibly enjoyed the same rights as other citizens, provided that their observance of Judaism remained in the private sphere, such as the home or place of worship. This division between public and private, with religion confined to the latter, was not only a mandate for Jews, but a general principle applied to all citizens and replicated across liberalising nation-states.

Despite the rhetoric of a common citizenship, the public sphere remains a space of power and hierarchy (Asad 2003, 184). States tend to accommodate the public presence of majority religions and those faiths that emphasise reason, the written word, interior belief, and progressive time—qualities that align with their ideological aims. In contrast, minority religions or those associated with excessive emotion, ritual, superstition, or apocalypticism, face far more stringent regulation in public life. Individuals who express such beliefs are seen as prioritising their religion over the supposed universality of citizenship and as failing to fully embrace the shared national project—even to constitute a threat to national security (Mahmood 2015, 52–3). Within the dominant regime of religious normativity, they risk the designation of ‘improper citizens’ and are subject to a range of sanctions, either from the state or the dominant culture. Within these terms, they are regarded as adherents of ‘false religion’ (Ramberg 2014, 13) and ‘a remnant of the past’ (Ramberg 2014, 14), relics from a dark and unenlightened time, from which properly modern people are presumed to have already liberated themselves (Ramberg 2014, 13–7, 71–4). Alternately, shifting from historical time to the lifecycle of an individual, they are infantilised—seen as childlike, lacking the maturity and strength required to navigate modernity.

The legacy of such secularising reforms is evident in contemporary healing practices in Turkey. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, prominent architects of the Turkish nation-state asserted that building a progressive, rational citizenry required dismantling ‘corrupted forms of religio-political authority, especially as embodied in the figure of the sultan and the sorts of religious leadership able to flourish under Ottoman rule’ (Dole 2012, 35). To this end, the state enacted sweeping secularising measures, including the closure of religious schools, the disbandment of Islamic courts, and a ban on religious garments (Dole 2012, 35). These reforms extended into the healthcare system. The state-sponsored development of a modern and scientific medical system was accompanied by a campaign to discredit and marginalise longstanding forms of religious healing, which were now deemed backwards, unscientific, and corrupt (Dole 2012, 56). That is to say, ‘once religious healers became associated with an unredeemable past that modernity was to supplant, it was possible to view their continued presence as a revolt of the past against the future’ (Dole 2012, 57).

Healing practices at the edges of acceptability reveal the enduring power of secularism in Turkey. Here, marginalised healers have to employ various strategies to appear sufficiently modern and secular, and thereby avoid state sanction. For example, cinci hocas are healers and ritual specialists who are widely ‘loathed’ within Turkey because they are perceived as a ‘corrupting force within the civilizing mission of secularism’, and a threat to ‘the health of individuals and the nation’ (Dole 2012, 129). To counter this portrayal and avoid unwanted state or media attention, a cinci hoca named Ibrahim presents himself as an entrepreneurial professional, imbuing his work with the legitimacy, authority, and modernity that this kind of figure is broadly taken to embody. Rather than calling himself a hoca, he refers to himself as a ‘medium’, a term he considers more modern. He has also legally incorporated his business, issues receipts to his clients, hands out business cards, keeps meticulous records of income and expenditures, and even has an accountant prepare his taxes (Dole 2012, 141–2). As with other secularising states, the Turkish state did not aim to eliminate religion, but instead to reconfigure it into a specific form. This included confining religion—especially minority and otherwise undesirable faiths—to the private sphere.

Similar dynamics are at work in France, where the state seeks to remake the practices of non-white Muslim immigrants and their descendants along these lines. A case in point comes from the Institute for the Cultures of Islam (ICI), part of a Parisian municipal government project launched in the early 2000s to ‘revitalize’ immigrant, working class neighbourhoods through investments in cultural programming (Fernando 2014, 107). Tensions emerged when the Muslim community’s practice of conducting Friday prayers in the streets—a public engagement with religion that secularism deems properly private—unsettled municipal officials and the ICI’s predominantly white, non-Muslim staff (Fernando 2014, 125).

In response to this breach in the secular order, the ICI’s second permanent site included a designated prayer room. In the words of one official, praying in this private space would be ‘more dignified than praying in the streets’ (Fernando 2014, 125). However, he also noted that the prayer room was not merely a pragmatic solution: providing a private space that would render public prayer unnecessary. In fact, he acknowledged that it was too small to accommodate everyone who would be praying in the streets. He expressed hope that practices such as daily prayers might ‘evolve’ and that the arrangement at the ICI might encourage the Muslim community to ‘find other habits’ (Fernando 2014, 125). Indeed, the layout of the new ICI building was designed to model the secular preference for an ostensibly areligious public culture and a private space for personal religious observance. To this end, large rooms open to both Muslims and non-Muslims were dedicated to the exhibition of Islamic culture (e.g. art exhibits, poetry, and concerts), while the prayer room, reserved for Muslims’ private religious devotion, was tucked away in a remote and difficult-to-access location (2014, 123–5).

Secular governance was never confined within national borders. Rather, secular powers often extended similar strategies to the colonies. They marginalised or even eliminated local traditions they deemed emotional, idolatrous, collectivist, or rooted in illegitimate authority—qualities seen as threats to colonial order and stability. At times, this entailed brutal repression or the destruction of sacred sites. More commonly, colonial administrations adopted strategies similar to those used in the metropole: privileging currents within local religious traditions that most closely resembled what they already considered ‘proper’ and ‘enlightened’ religion—especially those emphasising interior belief and private devotion. Colonial authorities hoped that such faiths would encourage colonised peoples to ‘play by the rules of the modern nation-state’ (Salomon 2016, 34; cf. Ramberg 2014, 15–6).

In Sudan, unable to locate religious authorities ‘who represented the type of Islam that the British sought to inaugurate’ (Salomon 2016, 42), the British colonial state began importing scholars of what they considered ‘proper’ Islam from Egypt, so that they might ‘administer religious matters’ and train locals in ‘the proper functioning of “orthodox” Islam’ (Salomon 2016, 42). Yet colonial officials did not imagine that these experts’ work alone could fulfil the broad civilising mission they envisioned. They regarded direct British intervention in the faith as essential to dislodge what they saw as local communities’ obstinate attachment to the past. Senior administrators even undertook detailed studies of Islamic law, convinced that mastering it would enable them to turn the colonial government itself into ‘the engine of the modernization of Islam’ (Salomon 2016, 42). As in the French and Turkish nation-states, the British colonial state in Sudan viewed dismantling religion’s role as a repository of tradition as vital to achieving progress and social order.

Socialist and postsocialist secularisms

Socialist and postsocialist contexts offer compelling insights into the distinctive ways that these regimes produced religion (Luehrmann 2011, 4; Schulz and Binder 2023). The research on these cases complicates simplistic portrayals of socialist societies as uniformly repressive of religion and the postsocialist period as a straightforward transition to religious freedom. For instance, against a common assumption that socialist states single-mindedly sought to eradicate religion, anthropological research shows that violent persecution was only one of many strategies they employed. In fact, except for in Albania, after World War II, ‘the communist parties of Eastern Europe to some degree resigned themselves to the persistence of religious institutions’ (Luehrmann 2015, 98–9), and many of them ‘largely respected the principle of separate spheres’ (Hann 2000, 15). Moreover, this literature highlights the enduring legacies of secular governance in the postsocialist era, as well as the new challenges minority religions faced amid rising militant nationalism (Hann 2000, 17).

In Kyrgyzstan, the Soviet state shaped a conception of Muslimness that stands in marked contrast to belief-centred understandings of religion, one in which being Muslim was defined primarily in ethno-national terms and was, in the community’s own view, ‘not religious’. Following the often-brutal campaigns of the 1930s and 1950s to suppress religious life, Soviet authorities increasingly limited their efforts to dismantling public Islamic institutions, largely ignoring practices that persisted in the domestic sphere, such as life-cycle rituals and certain Muslim holidays. Although this was not the state’s intended outcome, these private aspects of Muslim life came to resonate with the national identities the Soviet officials constructed and promoted among the diverse populations. This led to a situation in which, ‘by the end of the Soviet period, [Kyrgyz] identity was intimately tied to Muslimness, but a Muslimness which had been stripped of much of its "religious" content and could thus be made compatible with Soviet ideals and a political culture of secularism’ (McBrien and Pelkmans 2008, 90).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this established form of secular Muslimness persisted in Kyrgyzstan, but soon came into conflict with a competing vision of religion introduced by Muslim and Christian missionaries, which emphasised a clear distinction between national identity and religion. Despite their many differences, missionaries from both of these traditions shared a common understanding of religion and insisted that genuine conversion required Kyrgyzstanis to fully adopt it. For ‘the secularists’—those who continued to adhere to culturally grounded (and historically inflected through socialism) notions of Muslimness—these missionary efforts were deeply unsettling. Muslim missionaries were seen as undermining communal bonds and fuelled concerns that converts might embrace extremism or even terrorism (McBrien and Pelkmans 2008, 92). Christian missionaries were regarded as an even greater threat, as conversion to Christianity was perceived as a profound betrayal of the Kyrgyz nation itself; many secularists ‘doubted whether a converted Kyrgyz should still be seen as a Kyrgyz’ (McBrien and Pelkmans 2008, 95). These anxieties were further compounded by the absence of the Soviet institutions that had once legitimised and sustained the secularists’ understanding of Muslimness. Without these structures, secularists found themselves in a transformed discursive landscape, lacking the institutional authority they had once relied on sustaining their conception of religion (McBrien and Pelkmans 2008, 98).

Secularism has also been an important element of nation building across successive post-imperial Chinese political regimes. Under the Communist government that rose to power in 1949, the state officially sought the eradication of folk religion through a series of purges that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of religious figures and entailed the destruction of the vast majority of the country’s temples. At the same time, it also repurposed religious symbols, rituals, and structures to support its own vision of Chinese nationalism (Guo 2025; cf. Luehrmann 2011, 6). For instance, as the Communist Party developed the cult of Mao, it presented him in mass campaigns, daily rituals, and public performances in ways that evoked familiar religious imagery and sensibilities. Mao was likened to the sun, an association rooted in longstanding cosmologies that regarded the sun as the ultimate ‘source of all life and cosmic force’ (Guo 2025, 96). He was also portrayed as a figure who could offer people ‘not only a better life in this world but spiritual salvation’ (Guo 2025, 101). At the same time, the cult of Mao was not merely imposed from above. After Mao’s death in 1976, individuals and local communities played an active role in reshaping many of its elements through decentralised and often improvisational forms of engagement (Guo 2025, 101).

The Maoist regime’s subtle integration of religious elements contrasts with the explicit embrace of some religions’ value in contemporary Chinese life by Xi Jinping, the country’s current president. While the state continues to supress Islam and Christianity, which it links to ‘outside forces’, and those faiths it deems as threatening its authority, such as Falun Gong (Laliberté 2020), Xi argues that China’s traditional religions—Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and even minority traditions—can ‘help fill a [moral] vacuum created by the country’s breakneck growth and rush to get rich’ (Guo 2025, 125). His vision of the proper national order draws on and reinterprets the Confucian principle of ‘parental governance’, a framework that casts leaders as stern yet caring parents and citizens as dependent children. Within this model, Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, are portrayed as ‘the ideal couple and parents’, a role that situates them as the rightful guardians of the ‘sons and daughters of the Chinese nation’ (Guo 2025, 124). This discourse renders authoritarian power into the idiom of parental love (2025, 124), portraying dissent not as legitimate political critique but as the outbursts of ‘ungrateful, spoiled children deserving of correction’ (Guo 2025, 121). In this way, parental governance resonates with other forms of secularism, simultaneously providing a religiously inflected framework for imagining a shared national community and a means for distinguishing ‘proper’ citizens from those whose childlike behaviour and unruly emotions mark them as ‘improper’ citizens.

Conclusion

By questioning the supposed givenness of ‘religion’, the anthropology of secularism has shown how states deploy secularism to cultivate desired modes of citizens and regulate the public sphere, and it can continue to challenge scholarly debates by analysing emerging configurations of religion and the state. For example, many scholars and much of the media tend to overlook the religious dimension of contemporary right-wing governments or portray their religious aspect as mere political opportunism, pandering to a constituency gripped by irrational fervour—an unruly passion said to ultimately stem from economic disenfranchisement and cultural dislocation. The anthropology of secularism can offer a different approach, interpreting such political formations as sustained challenges to secularism—or even as efforts to construct an alternate framework, such as ‘conservative secularism’ (Harding 2019, 2021). In contrast to the model of secularism explored in much of this entry—which holds that religion must be privatised for a polity to flourish—conservative secularism contends that a well-ordered state and virtuous citizenry are impossible without state support for the ‘one true faith’. Moreover, while liberal secularism regards public religion as a vestige of a backward and violent past, conservative secularism inverts this historical narrative, asserting that contemporary disorder will persist until the nation returns to a social order rooted in divinely mandated morality, hierarchy, gender roles, and sexual norms.

Those who regard anthropology’s purpose as ‘making the world safe for human difference’ may view the analytical approaches of the anthropology of secularism as misguided, or even dangerous. The subfield’s effort to denaturalise secularism and attend to its more coercive and exclusionary effects can be seen as a critique of cultural, social, and legal safeguards that often serve to protect marginalised groups. To these concerns, Saba Mahmood provides one compelling response: ‘To critique a particular normative regime is not to reject or condemn it; rather, by analyzing its regulatory and productive dimensions, one only deprives it of innocence and neutrality so as to craft, perhaps, a different future’ (2016, 21).

References

Agrama, Hussein Ali. 2012. Questioning secularism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

———. 2003. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Casanova, José. 1994. Public religions in the modern world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dole, Christopher. 2012. Healing secular life: Loss and devotion in modern Turkey. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Fernando, Mayanthi. 2014. The Republic unsettled: Muslim French and the contradictions of secularism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Guo, Ting. 2025. Religion, secularism, and love as a political discourse in modern China. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Hann, Chris. 2000. “Problems with the (de)privatization of religion.” Anthropology Today 16, no. 6: 14–20.

Harding, Susan Friend. 2019. “Religion: It’s not what it used to be.” In Exotic no more: Anthropology for the contemporary world, edited by Jeremy MacClancy, 43–59. Second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2021. “Getting things back to normal: Populism, fundamentalism and liberal desire.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 29, no. 2: 310–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13042

Laliberté, André. 2020. “The two tracks of Xi Jinping’s religious policy.” Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, March 16. https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/the-two-tracks-of-xi-jinping-s-religious-policy

Luehrmann, Sonja. 2011. Secularism Soviet style: Teaching atheism and religion in a Volga republic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

———. 2015. “Antagonistic insights: Evolving Soviet atheist critiques of religion and why they matter for anthropology.” Social Analysis 59, no. 2: 97–113. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2015.590206

Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of piety. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———. 2016. Religious difference in a secular age: A minority report. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

McBrien, Julie, and Mathijs Pelkmans. 2008. “Turning Marx on his head: Missionaries, ‘extremists’ and archaic secularists in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.” Critique of Anthropology 28, no. 1: 87–103. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275X07086559

McLeod, Hugh. 2000. Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848–1914. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Ramberg, Lucinda. 2014. Given to the goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the sexuality of religion. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Salomon, Noah. 2016. For love of the Prophet: An ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic state. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schulz, Matthias, and Sarah Binder. 2023. “Introduction: An anthropology of nonreligion?” Religion and Society 14, no. 1: 99–112. https://doi.org/10.3167/arrs.2023.070301

Schröder, Ingo. 2011. “Preliminary anthropological reflections on secularism and secularity.” Kultūra Ir Visuomenė. Socialiniu˛ Tyrimu˛ Žurnalas 2, no. 3: 37–47.

Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers. 2018. The impossibility of religious freedom. New edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1871. Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. London: John Murray.

Note on contributor

William Girard is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. His research explores conservative Christianity in the Americas and the entanglements of Christianity and fossil fuels.