Secularism collapses the multilayered Christian cosmos into a dualist world.

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Secularism collapsed the medieval Christian cosmos into an ontological duality — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 945; Secularism collapses medieval interlinked time-space into a two-world duality — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 945; European secularism has absorbed Christianity into its own self-definition

Broader Connections

• Secularism collapsed the medieval Christian cosmos into an ontological duality #corroborates (0.97) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 945
• Secularism collapses medieval interlinked time-space into a two-world duality #expands (0.93) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 945
• European secularism has absorbed Christianity into its own self-definition #complicates (0.75)