A secular self underlies rather than results from religious experience.

Evidence

For not only was the idea of being true to oneself conceived of as a moral duty, it also presupposed the existence of a secular self whose sovereignty had to be demonstrated through acts of sincerity. The self’s secularity consisted in the fact that it was the precondition of transcendent (poetic or religious) experience and not its product. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 256

Categorization

• DEFINE: Asad defines ‘secular self’ precisely: the self as precondition, not product, of transcendent experience.
• XREF: Corroborates the Cooper thread via the idea that secular modernity quietly refigures but still channels Christian/religious categories (the poet-genius as secular prophet), complicating the clean secular/religious binary. — connects to: Enlightenment culture reproduces faith’s detached self-pain as unhappy consciousness. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 804