Publications

It has long been argued that “Africans” are supposedly “incurably” or “notoriously” religious. More specifically, traditional religions in Africa are regarded as operating outside of a secular framework, such as that which has been implemented in “Western democracies.” Recent studies, however, highlight a marked rise in religiosity, especially Pentecostalism and Salafism, and the loss of secularism and secular institutions in Africa. This leads us to question the inevitability of African religiosity, rendering implausible any claim that the continent has always been fundamentally religious. Indeed, at the time of their independence, many countries implemented socialist policies, with strongly secularist regimes in power. Considering whether the public sphere in African countries, or even the entire African population, is ‘more religious’ or ‘more secular’ is overly simplistic. It is necessary to instead scrutinise the motivations for differentiating between the religious and secular spheres, as well as any historical changes to the boundary between them. The concept of multiple secularities provides an analytical framework through which the boundary work between religious and secular spheres may be brought into focus. I will argue that, in most African countries, secularity was driven by the need to balance religious (and ethnic) diversity, and integrate the populations of the artificially created colonial states, after independence. In this paper, I reconstruct the relationship between institutions, social formations, cultural values, and ideologies, along the religious-secular divide, at the crucial time of state formation and independence.

This special issue, which is based on this interdisciplinary approach, derives from a workshop entitled ‘Material Secularities’ held at Leipzig University from 21–23 June 2023. The issue presents a selection of the papers presented and discussed during our seminar and revised subsequently. All papers address tangible things in the world that are situated in the boundary zone in which the distinction between religious and non-religious occurs, yet is also questioned: discarded Catholic statues set adrift with the closing down of churches in the Netherlands and spiritual artefacts from colonial collections kept in secular museums in Germany (Meyer); pork sacralized as an ultimate example of secular food in France (Ural); artificial lighting used to create the atmosphere of Nazi Party conventions (Echtler); monuments sacralizing white supremacy in the USA (Schaefer); the piano as an ‘affective artefact’ in nineteenth-century Europe (Bräunlein); dust winds and the difficulties in breathing in Khuzestan, Iran (Chavoshian); mosques and churches in religious miniature theme parks in the Netherlands and Turkey (Hemel); and the epics of Ali situated in the border zone between the secular and the Islamic in Turkey (Dinç).

Magnus Echtler, Birgit Meyer and Nur Yasemin Ural, eds. Material Secularities. Special issue of Secular Studies 7, no. 2 (2025).

In this article, I outline why materiality and human-object relations matters for the study of secularization. Social scientific research on secularization, secularism and secularities has been, for the most part, excessively focused on what people (no more) believe in, how these beliefs have been conceptualized, made explicit and canonized, and how beliefs (and their transformation into knowledge qua evidentiary practices) relate to how people practice their religion, or cease doing that. As I will show below, materiality has played little to no role in that. But, as the articles in this collection demonstrate, materiality—objects, food, atmospheres, light, and dust—has palpable consequences for configurations of religion and secularity, folding its own temporalities and intensities into religious and secular experiences. I also argue that religious and cultural heritage is an especially fruitful field to examine the role of materiality in secularization processes.

Marian Burchardt. "Material Secularities: New Terms for the Study of Secularization." In Material Secularities, special issue of Secular Studies 7, no. 2 (2025): 371–76. 

With the assertion of Buddhism as the dominant religion at the end of the 16th century, a new reflection on the relationship between the secular and the religious commenced among the Mongols. They adopted the Joint Twofold System of Governance formulated in Buddhist Tibet, and adapted it to the Mongolian cultural context. This system of governance is described in the work “The White History”, written in the late 16th century, with the epistemic distinctions between the religious and the secular discursively negotiated in the work. Although the impact of these distinctions on the social differentiations of Mongolian society during the Qing period (1644–1911) remains to be investigated, the “White History” nonetheless provides a valuable insight into pre-modern Mongolian notions of the distinction between the religious and the secular.