Secularism secured European peace by exporting religious violence to colonies.

Evidence

Secularism is popularly understood in the way that the philosopher Charles Taylor describes its origins. As Talal Asad discusses in his book Formations of the Secular, Taylor argues that the modern state has to make citizenship the primary principle of identity because this is the only way that it can transcend the conflicts that emerge from different identities. But secularism does not simply provide peace and toleration, as Taylor imagines. Secularism secures the power of the state as neutral arbiter. For Taylor, the state resolves the quarrels among different groups through persuasion and negotiation. Asad sees a less benign state that exercises force to guarantee the social arrangements it wants. At its inception in Europe, secularism as political doctrine guaranteed the peace between warring religious factions by shifting the site of violence from within Europe to outside of it. Secularism’s triumph as political doctrine is closely connected to colonialism and to the rise of a system of capitalist nation-states. Of all the things that secularism can mean, it has not always meant tolerance. Those who do not fit the public personality of the state are simply defined as religious minorities and find themselves in a defensive position. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 369

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s MOC thread about frame-dependent harm claims: Asad supplies a structural account that operates independently of the definitional dispute.
• DEFINE: Lays out the Taylor-vs-Asad divide on what secularism is, positioning it as power-securing rather than mere tolerance.