The secular is neither a continuation nor a negation of the religious.

Evidence

The secular, I argue, is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred). I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life. To appreciate this it is not enough to show that what appears to be necessary is really contingent—that in certain respects “the secular” obviously overlaps with “the religious.” It is a matter of showing how contingencies relate to changes in the grammar of concepts—that is, how the changes in concepts articulate changes in practices. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 101

Categorization

• DEFINE: Asad’s core redefinition: the secular is not the ‘latest phase’ of religion nor its opposite but a concept gathering behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities.
• XREF: Connects to the vaulted Cooper argument about how ‘secular modernity’ assumes Christian-shaped categories — Asad gives the theoretical machinery for that claim. — connects to: Secular ideology itself enables racial exclusion, not the religion it blames. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 690
• DEEPTHINKING: The methodological insistence — showing that conceptual change articulates with changed practices rather than merely exposing contingency — is a paradigm-level framing of how to critique ‘modernity.’
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 101