Explaining religion’s influence requires tracing followers’ traditions, not mechanical causation

Evidence

We should not accept the mechanical idea of causality always and without question. Thus if we take cause to be about the way an event is “felt” in subsequent events, we will tend to look for the continuity of religious causes in nonreligious effects. But searching in this way for the origin of elements or for the “influence” of events on one another is, I would submit, of limited value here: what requires explaining (how nationalism contains a religious influence) is being used innocently as the means of explanation (religion as at once both cause and effect). If instead we were to attend to an older sense of cause (cause is that which answers to the question “Why?”) we would ask about the reformation of historical elements in order to understand why their meaning is no longer what it was. After all, religion consists not only of particular ideas, attitudes, and practices, but of followers. To discover how these followers instantiate, repeat, alter, adapt, argue over, and diversify them (to trace their tradition) must surely be a major task. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 947

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrasts mechanical causality with the older sense of cause as answering ‘Why?’ — a genuinely clarifying conceptual distinction.
• SEED: An essay angle: the secularization thesis as a circular argument that assumes what it purports to explain, applied across contemporary headlines about political Islam.
• XREF: connects to: Religious claims require living examples to be understood and believed — Chuck Missler, The Kingdom, Power and Glory: The…, 1467