Same public charitable works by religious actors are criminalized once they challenge secular authority

Evidence

From the point of view of secularism, religion has the option either of confining itself to private belief and worship or of engaging in public talk that makes no demands on life. In either case such religion is seen by secularism to take the form it should properly have. Each is equally the condition of its legitimacy. But this requirement is made difficult for those who wish to reform life given the ambition of the secular state itself. Because the modern nation-state seeks to regulate all aspects of individual life—even the most intimate, such as birth and death—no one, whether religious or otherwise, can avoid encountering its ambitious powers. It’s not only that the state intervenes directly in the social body for purposes of reform; it’s that all social activity requires the consent of the law, and therefore of the nation-state. The way social spaces are defined, ordered, and regulated makes them all equally “political.” So the attempt by Muslim activists to ameliorate social conditions—through, say, the establishment of clinics or schools in underserviced areas—must seriously risk provoking the charge of political illegitimacy and being classified Islamist. … Such cases of deprivatized religion are intolerable to secularists primarily because of the motives imputed to their opponents rather than to anything the latter have actually done. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 968

Categorization

• XREF: Bridges directly to Cooper’s argument that the secular/religious split is a politically installed boundary, not a neutral description. — connects to: Anti-terror material support laws criminalize religious charity and political solidarity; Material-support law criminalizes religious charity implicated in Palestinian solidarity — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 590; When believers cannot be visually identified, lawmakers criminalize the religion wholesale.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’/‘sacrifice’ articles’ shared theme: moral categories are enforced retroactively on motive, not act.