Secular law and religious ritual do not share an underlying structure

Evidence

Typically, this mode of explanation by analogy presents “the secular” (the law) as a desacralized version of “the religious” (the ritual). Yet the internal structure of the two cases is not the same. Modern law defines the liability of legal persons such as landlords prior to any tort, whereas scapegoats are constituted in relation to specific transgressions. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 470

Categorization

• XREF: This directly serves the reader’s stated bridge to Cooper: it’s Asad’s core method of denying that ‘the secular’ is just desacralized religion, which the secularness-privileges-Christianity argument must engage.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that secular law and religious ritual share form only superficially is load-bearing for the whole book and resists one-sentence summary.