Attributing a religious motive presupposes contested theories of inwardness and sincerity

Evidence

Nor is it always clear how a “religious motive” is to be unequivocally identified in modern society. Is motivated behavior that accounts for itself by religious discourse ipso facto religious or only when it does so sincerely? But insincerity may itself be a construction of religious language. Is it assumed that there is always an unconscious motive to a religious act, a motive that is therefore secular, as Freud and others have done? But that begs the question of how to distinguish between the religious and the secular. In short, to identify a (religious) motive for violence one must have a theory of motives that deals with concepts of character and dispositions, inwardness and visibility, the thought and the unthought. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 55

Categorization

• XREF: This deepens the Cooper-thread parallel: if the religious/secular distinction itself is unstable, then Cooper’s ‘Christian social conservatism as the hidden religious core of secular neoliberalism’ gains a methodological footing — both treat the boundary itself as manufactured.
• DEFINE: Asad is dismantling ‘religious motive’ as a transparent analytic category by showing it silently presupposes contested theories of inwardness, disguise, and sincerity.