Christianity masked its own dominance by promoting secularism as generic critique.

Evidence

Apter also significantly notes Said’s alleged “flirtation” with matters of God just before his untimely death in 2003. She says: “Almost seeming at times to be flirting with the temptations of paradise himself, Said identifies the godly within humanism with a logic of extension.” Yet this mere “extension,” seemingly born in the last year or two of Said’s life, does not save his analysis of Massignon or of any appreciation of the “spiritual” Orient, which always seemed to him to do nothing but pit the Orient, as the Other, against the “secular” Occident. … Genealogically, furthermore, we will do well to take seriously the religious studies scholar Gil Anidjar’s assertion that “Christianity made itself increasingly forgettable by foregrounding religion as a generic category and a target of criticism, … doing so at the same time it was arguing for the end of religion in its own practice, often pushing its colonial endeavor explicitly as a kind of critical secularism, a secular science.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 106

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to critiques of secularism as ‘masked Christianity’ found in Talal Asad and Charles Taylor’s secularism debates.
• SEED: Angle: how ‘critical secularism’ as a colonial export still determines which spiritual traditions get taken seriously today.