Religious influence in modernity cannot be located by mechanical cause-effect tracing.

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. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 947

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates Cooper’s causal claim that modern neoliberalism is structured by Christian social conservatism; Asad warns that borrowing religion as both cause and effect begs the question.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Asad’s anti-mechanical causal stance bear on whether Cooper’s genealogy of Christian influence is methodologically licensed or falls into self-confirming reverse influence?