Secular rituals sacralized reason and civil society in early modern nations

Evidence

More recently, Margaret Jacob has made an argument about the historical connection between secular rituals and the formation of modern political values. She describes how a new pattern of sentiments, beliefs, and ceremonial activities—a “new religiosity”—came to be associated with eighteenth-century Freemasonry, and how it contributed to the emergence of liberal society. “Reason” and “civil society,” she proposes, were thus sacralized in the life of early West European nations—and (in her view) a good thing too. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 915

Categorization

• XREF: Jenkins? Not vaulted. This ‘sacralization of reason and civil society’ parallels Asad’s core claim that secularism covertly sacralizes particular (Western, Christian-derived) norms — corroborates the bridge to Cooper’s argument about secular modernity quietly privileging Christian social norms.
• SEED: This is directly citable for an essay arguing that ‘sacred civil society’ in the West is the unmarked baseline against which Muslim public religiosity is judged immoderate.