Secular redemptive politics resembles Christian myth 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
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Against the usual claim that secularism is crypto-Christianity; complements the reader’s notes on sacrifice as stabilizing social structures.
Related
- Secular projects resemble Christian redemption without being essentially Christian (similarity 0.94)
- Liberalism’s secular myth resembles but differs from Christian redemptive myth. (similarity 0.90)
- The secular is conceptually dependent on the idea of religion. (similarity 0.82)
- Secularism is not a mask for religion. (similarity 0.80)
- Myth is conventionally opposed to the secular even by myth’s defenders (similarity 0.80)
- Secular ideologies replicate religious salvation-history as a narrative form. (similarity 0.80)
- Secularism’s essence is not protecting freedoms from religious tyranny (similarity 0.79)
- Secularism is a legal-moral arrangement, not the liberating opposite of religious tyranny (similarity 0.79)
- Secular liberal states depend on political origin myths for their virtues (similarity 0.79)
- The secular is a contingent doctrine, not an emancipation from religion (similarity 0.78)
- Liberal democracy’s secular theory rests on two mutually contradictory myths (similarity 0.78)
- The secular cannot be conceived without the category of religion. (similarity 0.78)