Secularism collapses medieval interlinked time-space into a two-world duality

Evidence

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: Connects to Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities,’ which this passage extends and critiques.
• DEEPTHINKING: The compression of medieval interlinked times into a modern self-authenticating/reality vs imagined-religion binary is a dense, reusable frame.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 945