Secular modernity paradoxically claims to have produced the religion it excludes.

Evidence

The interesting thing about this view is that although religion is regarded as alien to the secular, the latter is also seen to have generated religion. Historians of progress relate that in the premodern past secular life created superstitious and oppressive religion, and in the modern present secularism has produced enlightened and tolerant religion. Thus the insistence on a sharp separation between the religious and the secular goes with the paradoxical claim that the latter continually produces the former. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 942

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEEPTHINKING: Asad names a genuine conceptual contradiction in the secular-religious binary: the boundary that separates them is itself produced and policed from the secular side, so the ‘opposite’ of religion is its precondition.
• SEED: Article angle: the secularist ‘we made your religion’ argument as a covert form of theological authority, and how it still structures modern state regulation of belief.

Related

• Secularism claims to have generated tolerant modern religion (similarity 0.95)
• The secular cannot be conceived without the category of religion. (similarity 0.85)
• The secular is conceptually dependent on the idea of religion. (similarity 0.85)
• Secularism’s essence is not protecting freedoms from religious tyranny (similarity 0.84)
• The secular is neither a continuation nor a negation of the religious. (similarity 0.83)
• Secularism is a legal-moral arrangement, not the liberating opposite of religious tyranny (similarity 0.83)
• The secular is a contingent doctrine, not an emancipation from religion (similarity 0.82)
• Secularism is not a mask for religion. (similarity 0.82)
• The secular Enlightenment replaced one conceptual binary rather than ending binary thinking (similarity 0.82)
• The religious and secular are not essentially fixed categories. (similarity 0.81)
• Secularism’s Western Christian origin does not limit its modern global applicability. (similarity 0.80)
• Secularism collapsed the medieval Christian cosmos into an ontological duality (similarity 0.80)
• Church-state separation alone does not define secularism’s novelty (similarity 0.80)
• The narrative of progress from religious to secular is now untenable (similarity 0.80)
• Secularism’s contested meaning turns on its relation to ontology and epistemology. (similarity 0.80)