The secular-religious categories that define modern living are constructed, not discovered

Evidence

Modernity is not primarily a matter of cognizing the real but of living-in-the-world. Since this is true of every epoch, what is distinctive about modernity as a historical epoch includes modernity as a politicaleconomic project. What interests me particularly is the attempt to construct categories of the secular and the religious in terms of which modern living is required to take place, and nonmodern peoples are invited to assess their adequacy. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 66

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the Cooper argument in the vault: both treat the secular/religious binary as a constructed modern instrument that encodes specific (Christian-derived) norms. — connects to: Religion and nationalism are modern categories co-created by the secular order, not ancient givens. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 306
• SEED: Angle: ‘Categories as invitation’ — the secular/religious binary as a device that invites nonmodern peoples to measure their own adequacy, functioning like conditionality in Cooper’s loan-restructuring argument.