Secular projects resemble Christian redemption without being essentially Christian

Evidence

But the similarity of these projects to the Christian idea of redemption should not, I submit, lead us to think of them as simple restatements of sacred myth, as projects that are only apparently secular but in reality religious. For although the New Testament myth may have assisted in the formation of these secular projects it does not follow that the latter are essentially Christian. They embrace a distinctive politics (democratic, anticlerical), they presuppose a different kind of morality (based on the sacredness of individual conscience and individual right), and they regard suffering as entirely subjective and accidental (as bodily damage to be medically treated, or as corrective punishment for crime, or simply as the unfinished business of universal empowerment). — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 301

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the Cooper bridge: Asad warns against the very analytic move (reading ‘actually secular but really religious’) that a naive version of Cooper-style argument could make, and against the crude ‘secularism is secularized Christianity’ genealogy.
• DEFINE: Asad pinpoints what actually differentiates secular from Christian redemptive projects: distinctive politics, conscience-based morality, and suffering read as subjective accident.