The modern nation-state renders all social activity political, so religious charity becomes politically suspect

Evidence

From the point of view of secularism, religion has the option either of confining itself to private belief and worship or of engaging in public talk that makes no demands on life. In either case such religion is seen by secularism to take the form it should properly have. Each is equally the condition of its legitimacy. But this requirement is made difficult for those who wish to reform life given the ambition of the secular state itself. Because the modern nation-state seeks to regulate all aspects of individual life—even the most intimate, such as birth and death—no one, whether religious or otherwise, can avoid encountering its ambitious powers. It’s not only that the state intervenes directly in the social body for purposes of reform; it’s that all social activity requires the consent of the law, and therefore of the nation-state. The way social spaces are defined, ordered, and regulated makes them all equally “political.” So the attempt by Muslim activists to ameliorate social conditions—through, say, the establishment of clinics or schools in underserviced areas—must seriously risk provoking the charge of political illegitimacy and being classified Islamist. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 968

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how the welfare state’s takeover of charity spaces criminalizes religious social provision — compare with the Algerian and Turkish cases that follow as disproof-by-example of simple secularization.
• XREF: Connects to the deprived-of-agency treatment of charity and social provision in Mauss-style gift theory and to contemporary debates on faith-based welfare services.