Secularism claims to have generated tolerant modern religion

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

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that the secular both excludes and produces religion — the boundary is performative, not descriptive — is a subtle, dense insight that resists paraphrase.
• XREF: This is the axial insight bridging to vaulted Cooper work: the secular/religious boundary is drawn from within secular modernity, which quietly sets the terms (enlightened vs oppressive religion) that code Islam as premodern. — connects to: A secular majority depends on the religion it claims to resent. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 773
• SEED: Angle: ‘who gets to decide which religion is enlightened’ as the hidden power move shared by secular statecraft and market-friendly Christianity.