Reading scripture as myth helped constitute the secular as an epistemological domain

Evidence

As textualized memory, secular history has of course became integral to modern life in the nation-state. But although it is subject, like all remembered time, to continuous re-formation, reinvestment, and reinvocation, secular history’s linear temporality has become the privileged measure of all time. The rereading of the scriptures through the grid of myth has not only separated the sacred from the secular, it has helped to constitute the secular as the epistemological domain in which history exists as history—and as anthropology. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 204

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Cooper argument: secular modernity’s self-definition was forged precisely through demoting religious text to ‘myth’ — a mirror of how Cooper shows Christian norms persisting beneath secular-neoliberal claims.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that reading scripture as myth ‘constituted the secular as the epistemological domain’ is a dense genealogical argument: the secular is not opposed to religion but produced by a specific practice of categorizing it.