Secular concepts of religion arose through colonial encounters that recoded native practice as illusion

Evidence

What facilitated the essentialization of “the sacred” as an external, transcendent power? My tentative answer is that new theorizations of the sacred were connected with European encounters with the non-European world, in the enlightened space and time that witnessed the construction of “religion” and “nature” as universal categories. From early modern Europe—through what is retrospectively called the secular Enlightenment and into the long nineteenth century, within Christian Europe and in its overseas possessions—the things, words, and practices distinguished or set apart by “Nature Folk” were constituted by Europeans as “fetish” and “taboo.” What had been regarded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in theological terms as “idolatry” and “devil-worship” (devotion to false gods) became the secular concept of “superstition” (a meaningless survival) in the framework of eighteenthand nineteenth-century evolutionary thought. … They had to be constituted as categories of illusion and oppression before people could be liberated from them, as Freud knew when he used “fetish” and “taboo” to identify symptoms of primitive repressions in the psychopathology of modern individuals. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 161

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Cooper thread: ‘secular modernity’ encoding its own Christian-colonial genealogy. Asad grounds the religion category in European colonial encounters, which complicates the clean secular-vs-religious divide Cooper’s neoliberal narrative relies on. — connects to: Secularism as a category masks the colonial dimension of settler nationalisms — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 301; The same colonial influence that established secularism also provoked Buddhist communalism — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 135
• DEFINE: Tracks the historical shift of key terms: idolatry/devil-worship becoming superstition, fetish and taboo as secular concepts.