Secularism collapsed the medieval Christian cosmos into an ontological duality

Evidence

This construct is no less real for being ideological; it articulates a world of actual objects and subjects within which the secular nationalist lives. … What needs to be emphasized beyond Anderson’s famous thesis is that the complex medieval Christian universe, with its interlinked times (eternity and its moving image, and the irruptions of the former into the latter: Creation, Fall, Christ’s life and death, Judgment Day) and hierarchy of spaces (the heavens, the earth, purgatory, hell), is broken down by the modern doctrine of secularism into a duality: a world of self-authenticating things in which we really live as social beings and a religious world that exists only in our imagination. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 945

Categorization

• XREF: This is the exact structural point the reader wants to bridge to Cooper: ‘religion exists only in our imagination’ is the conceptual move that lets Christian norms be naturalized as secular while Islam’s religious character is rendered suspect/alien.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mapping of medieval cosmology’s temporal irruptions and spatial hierarchy onto modern secularity’s ontological duality is the chapter’s densest, most paradigm-shifting formulation.