Resisting the Secular: Practice, Coloniality, and the Politics of Temporality

This paper argues that the secularization thesis, as a hermeneutical framework for interpreting modern temporality, performs a double reduction: it reduces time to abstract representations and religion to disembodied doctrine. This double reduction is not just descriptively inadequate: by classifying non-modern temporalities as "religious" or "pre-modern," the secular/religious distinction functions as a mechanism of political deactivation that forecloses the critical potential of temporalities that subvert the coloniality of time. Drawing on post-secular critique and decolonial theory—including Quijano, Maldonado-Torres, Wynter, and An Yountae—the paper shows that these traditions, despite their convergence, have not fully elaborated how the coloniality of time operates through a systematic and practical redeployment of the sacred. A practice-based framework, informed by Bourdieu and Vallega's account of the coloniality of time as an aisthetic disposition, reveals how this operation occurs. To identify how time is decolonized, I argue, we must decolonize the frameworks through which we read it.