Universal suffrage and government by classification replaced the medieval body of Christian souls.

Evidence

Long-standing habits of indifference, disbelief, or hostility among individuals toward Christian rituals and authorities were now becoming entangled with projects of total social reconstruction by means of legislation. A critical rearticulation was being negotiated between state law and personal morality. This shift presupposed the new idea of society as a total population of individuals enjoying not only subjective rights and immunities, and endowed with moral agency, but also possessing the capacity to elect their political representatives—a shift that occurred all at once in Revolutionary France (excluding women and domestics), and gradually in nineteenth-century England. The extension of universal suffrage was in turn linked—as Foucault has pointed out—to new methods of government based on new styles of classification and calculation, and new forms of subjecthood. These principles of government are secular in the sense that they deal solely with a worldly disposition, an arrangement that is quite different from the medieval conception of a social body of Christian souls each of whom is endowed with equal dignity—members at once of the City of God and of divinely created human society. The discursive move in the nineteenth century from thinking of a fixed “human nature” to regarding humans in terms of a constituted “normality” facilitated the secular idea of moral progress defined and directed by autonomous human agency. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 95

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s biopolitics and governmentality as well as the reader’s prior work on communication as culture and the shift in discursive regimes.
• DEFINE: Defines the secular as a governmental doctrine predicated on society as a population of rights-bearing, electing individuals—contrasted with the pre-modern social body of Christian souls.