Introduction: After the Postsecular

Abstract

the notion that something called "secularization" provides an adequate conceptual framework for the post-Enlightenment movement of bodies and belief, of thought and authority, has come under sustained and multidimensional assault. We have become, as the term goes, postsecular, to the degree we understand those assaults to have been, finally, cumulatively, fatal. It's a fairly noncontroversial position at this point, as stated by Asad way back in 2003: "If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable" (2003, 1). Disenchantment, a swing from superstition to rationality, credulity to skepticism, eschatological fanaticism to liberal tolerance: ours is a scholarly moment no longer persuaded by the clarities of these stories of modernity, nor by the neat dichotomies nested within them. So the secularization thesis is dead. This must be distinctly understood.