Secularization shifts belonging from racial birthright to formal qualification and earned commitment.

Evidence

Secularization, as Habermas remarks, has the potential for releasing new social meanings. These meanings now are mobilized, if not generated, through markets, media (including information technologies), and novel forms of secularizing administrative modalities. Where belonging was the driving force of racial sacralization, equal citizenship is the standardbearer of the secular state. Bonds of belonging alter from those of racial birthright to those of formal qualification and earned commitment, including cultural knowledge. Categorizing and counting by race, alongside stressing racial distinction and separated development, were to give way to a common national culture qualified by weak cultural differences in private social life. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1588

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Habermas on secularization/postsecularism, and to the broader claim that modernity’s secular state replaces ascriptive belonging with formal citizenship. — connects to: The substance behind democratic homogeneity shifts historically, from religious conviction to national belonging. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 176