What does it mean for scholars of religion to study “the secular” in the context of a nation experiencing profound shifts toward authoritarian populism? This panel examines that question’s intellectual and moral implications from a variety of perspectives. Through specialized studies cutting across multiple subfields, panelists will explore features of the current US-American moment that are especially salient sites for interrogating the secular. The first illuminates the persistence of theological logics within the seemingly secular systems through which coloniality and economic exploitation intersect, while a second argues that the failure of American secularism to contain Christian nationalism must be addressed in theological registers. The next two presenters turn to the rhetoric of “the secular” itself, with one exploring the articulations of secularity as inherently hostile to traditional religion in American conservative legal discourse, and another interrogating what more nuanced scholarly treatments of “secularism” and the “secular” might offer religious studies.
Decolonial scholarship often overlooks the constitutive role of theology in shaping coloniality, framing it as a precursor to secular modernity. This paper challenges that narrative, arguing that seemingly "secular" economic and political systems are structured by theological logics in disguise. Specifically, I examine how the concept of debt, central to both Christian soteriology and capitalist economics, functions as a key mechanism of colonial power. This theological-economic logic shapes not only economic exploitation, but also racial, gendered, and epistemic hierarchies. By exposing this logic, I challenge the assumed opposition between theology and economics, demonstrating that a deeper engagement with colonial theology is essential for dismantling colonial legacies. Crucially, this analysis interrogates dominant understandings of "freedom," revealing how they are often predicated on the unfreedom of others. This calls for reimaging of freedom beyond the confines of colonial power.
Despite being framed as a safeguard against religious authoritarianism, secularism has failed to prevent the resurgence of Christian nationalism in the United States. This paper interrogates why secularism has proven inadequate, by reading Perry and Whitehead’s Taking America Back for God through the lens of An Yountae’s The Coloniality of the Secular. The secular is not a neutral space, but a colonial theological formation that has shaped religion, governance, and race in ways that have enabled—rather than resisted—the rise of Christian nationalism.
In response, I argue for the need for a "theology of the secular"—a translation of the secular into theological terms for the purposes of explicit theological discourse. An’s work uncovers the decolonial potential in making the implicit theology of decolonial poets explicit. I build on his work to argue that explicit theological discourse is essential for constructing a space of ethical and political resistance to Christian nationalism.
This paper explores the emergence and gradual ascendence of a particular formulation of secularity within the jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court. Beginning with the Court’s first overt reference to secularity as a legal principle, this paper then traces the near-simultaneous emergence of a discourse of “cruel” secularity – a characterization of the secular legal aspirations of the 1960s as both a symptom of growing American hostility to particular religious worldviews and a subtle endeavor to establish a system of values that reflects the sensibilities of political liberals. This “cruel” counterpart to the legal secularity of the 1960s hearkens back to longstanding conservative anxieties about modernity, but this paper will focus upon the way in which, beginning in the 1980s, it became framed as a legal problem to be addressed by U.S. courts.
This paper argues that scholars of religion should treat the secular tradition and its cognate concepts, like secularism and secularity, like we treat other “religious” traditions, i.e., as a mix of good and bad and a source of both help and harm. This paper pushes back against the current trend of treating “secularism” as a catch-all name for the harms of liberalism, colonialism, technocracy, and even Christianity (such as when scholars elide the differences between Protestant and secular ways of life). Hopefully by treating the secular as an internally diverse tradition we can help resolve some glaring tensions among scholars of religion, who are wary of Christian nationalism, worried about the use and abuse of religious discourse, defensive of religious ways of life, dissatisfied with liberalism, and anxious about the erosion of the separation of church and state. Hopefully we can also have a more productive conversation about out differences.