Cultural Christianity: A Reading List
Or: just because you don't believe in Jesus doesn't mean your Christmas tree isn't religious, because defining religiosity as an individual's authentic belief in a set of propositions continues the colonial project of imposing Western, Post-Reformation definitions of "religion" on the rest of the planet.
“Religion [as modern people define the category] is anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christianity. Such a definition might be seen as crass, simplistic, ethnocentric, Christianocentric, and even a bit flippant; it is all these things, but it is also highly accurate in reflecting the uses of the term in modern languages.” -Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (2013)
“Several times before the Reformation, the boundary between the religious and the secular was redrawn, but always the formal authority of the Church remained preeminent. In later centuries, with the triumphant rise of modern science, modern production, and the modern state, the churches would also be clear about the need to distinguish the religious from the secular, shifting, as they did so, the weight of religion more and more onto the moods and motivations of the individual believer. Discipline (intellectual and social) would, in this period, gradually abandon religious space, letting ‘belief,’ ‘conscience,’ and ‘sensibility’ take its place.” -Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity & Islam (1993)
“In other words, our definitions of religion, especially insofar as they assume a privatised and cognitive character behind religion (as in religious belief), simply reflect (and assume normative) the West’s distinctive historical feature of the secularized state. Religion, precisely, is not social, not coercive [in the way the secular state is], is individual, is belief-oriented and so on, because in our day and age there are certain apparently free-standing cultural institutions, such as the Church, which are excluded from the political state.” -William E. Arnal, in Guide to the Study of Religion (2000)
Religion, Religions, Religious by Jonathan Z. Smith
The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category by Talal Asad
Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept by Brent Nongbri (full book, but an article summarising it here)
Christians as Believers by Malcolm Ruel
Secular, Secularization, Secularisms by José Casanova
Rethinking Secularisation: A Global Perspective by José Casanova
The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor (but there's some bullshit in Taylor that always needs counterbalancing)
The Invention of World Religions by Tomoko Masuzawa (full book)
“Protestantism and modernity (and, one might add, capitalism) alike, even conjointly, seek to abstract the subject from its material and social entanglements in the name of freedom and authenticity. It is in this, I think, that we can see one suppressed link between modernist views of language and things, and the more theological concerns expressed by Protestant and other religious reformers: the value of freedom and abstraction lies, at least in part, in their offer of transcendence. Gifts symbolic of intentions, words true to the heart and to the world of referents, actions taken without deference to other persons, and the abstract value represented by money are the quotidian forms of such transcendence.” -Webb Keane, “Sincerity, ‘Modernity,’ and the Protestants” (2002)
“[The] Christian (more precisely Protestant) stress on sincerity [defines] what we have come to understand as religion. … The entire world of liberal modernity can be usefully understood in terms of the tropes of sincerity. The centrality of the individual and the valuation of the private are after all central to the normative program of liberal, enlightened modernity. From this follows modernity’s extremely discursive character, its cultural stress on the unique and singular, and in this country anyway, its privileging of individual choice above repetitive action [i.e., ritual, constructed as empty of religious significance because people don’t “believe” in it]. Certain aspects of this cultural code, of course, go back to the very foundations of the European and Western civilizational endeavor. The importance given to individual will as an explanation for social change has, for example, been a critical trope in Western political thought for centuries. The workings of the individual will of course are singular, unique, discursive, and indicative to the highest degree. It is the sincere written on the course of history.” – Adam B. Seligman, et al., Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (2008)
“Whiteness is secular, and the secular is white. The unmarked racial category and the unmarked religious category jointly mark their others. Or, put another way, the desire to stand outside religion and the desire to stand outside race are complementary delusions, for the seemingly outside is in fact the hegemonic. … We ask whether studying the management or exclusion of religion without also studying the management or exclusion of race captures a symptom and conceals a disease. We ask whether it is ever possible to talk about secularism without talking about whiteness.” -Vincent W. Lloyd, Race & Secularism in America (2016)
In short: if you want to argue that a Christmas tree can be secular, you first have to prove that Western Christianity is uniquely correct and that everyone else is wrong. Understand that other people may disagree.