Articles

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. 

This article investigates the changing role of folk books and folklore research in the history of the Turkish nation state from a global perspective through a material approach to secularity, including superstition as a third category to the secular–religious nexus. I propose to conceptualize folk books as ‘religious media’ and to use them as legitimate sources to trace the fluidity between Alevis and Sunnis in terms of reverence for Ali, as well as to recognize the agency of Alevis and the role of Alevism in folklore research before the rise of identity politics in the 1990s. I argue that such a shift in perspective and methodology enables us to understand how Alevism was excluded from the realm of religion during the early Cold War. It also contributes to the recent critical research on religion and secularism with an alternative history of Turkish modernity in terms of religious transformation.

Gökçen B. Dinç. "From Common Religious Media to Materialities of Superstition." In Material Secularities, special issue of Secular Studies 7, no. 2 (2025): 324–44.

What does secularity feel like when blown through the air rather than designated by state secularism? How does dust-wind unsettle the distinction between religion and politics? This article places dust-wind at the centre of an ethnographic engagement with material effects and affective resonances that shape the problem-space of secularism in Iran. In the past decade, the eruption of dust-winds across the Iran-Iraq borderlands has drastically impacted people’s relations with their environment: in religious discourse, dust undergirds various modes of veneration and commemoration among the Shi’i inhabitants. However, when risen in the air it intrudes breathing and invokes transgressive interpretations. I analyse material secularity through the phenomenon of bad air and the distinction between the religious ‘respiratory sacrifice’ and the secular ‘right to breathe’. While ‘respiratory sacrifice’ connotes dust as a reliquary of martyrs, the ‘right to breathe’ concerns dust-winds and necessary repairs. I draw on two notions of ‘atmosphere’, one spiritual and orchestrated, the other, meteorologically hazardous bad air. Together they make up contesting atmospheric collectives that unsettle formal religious scripts. I argue that atmospheric collectives recalibrate environmental protests while dilating dust to produce a secular materiality.

Sana Chavoshian. “Secular Atmosphere Dust-Winds in Iran’s Landscapes of War.” In Material Secularities, special issue of Secular Studies 7, no. 2 (2025): 302–23.

The idea of atmospheres as spatially spilled emotions with the power to bodily move people has been the German contribution to the affective turn in academic discourse. In this article, I discuss Hermann Schmitz’ and Gernot Böhme’s ideas on the reception and production of atmospheres in order to argue that their conceptualization tells a “substraction story” that characterizes the secular age for Charles Taylor. The emotional forces that move the felt body [German: Leib] became atmospheres only once the gods were discounted. Both Schmitz and Böhme refer to the explicit creation of atmospheres in National-Socialist politics, and I present the “Cathedral of Light” performance of the Nazi Party Rallies as paradigmatic for the making of secular atmospheres. On this basis, I discuss the use value of atmospheres for the analysis of material secularities, and its fascist affinities, at least in Schmitz’ rendition.

Magnus Echtler. “Making Secular Atmospheres: The Cathedral of Light at the Nazi Party Rallies, 1936–1938.” In Material Secularities, special issue of Secular Studies 7, no. 2 (2025): 222–47.

From its conception, the secular was and is dependent on emotions and affects. Moreover, secular affects are neither abstract nor internal, but consist of the relationality of humans, non-human entities (animals, plants, hormones, air, water, microorganisms, etc.) and things, so they are dependent on materiality. Emotions and affects are public and not just the internal affairs of individuals. The first part of this article provides an overview of the ways in which emotions and affects are conceptualized in the literature on religion and the secular in order to trace the genealogy of the Christian tradition of ‘religion’ and to propose an affect-centred approach as an alternative to the canon of belief that privileges feeling and immediate inner experience over knowing or doing. In the second part, a paradigm of affects of the secular as material, sensory and ‘aesthetic formations’ is illustrated by two examples of the religionization of the minority and the culturalization of the majority, using the example of clothing and pork consumption within French laicïté.

Nur Yasemin Ural. “Affective Secularity.“ In Material Secularities, special issue of Secular Studies 7, no. 2 (2025): 202–21.

The main argument put forward in this article is that, while both religion and secularity cannot be but material, it is important to acknowledge the materiality of secularity for two reasons. One, doing so allows the resort to materiality to be criticized and transcended as part of a politics of ousting manifestations of religions perceived as Other from a dominant perspective (as is the case with views of Islam in Western societies). Second, it allows a gap to be recognized between drawing a boundary between the religious and non-religious in the name of secularity on an abstract level of analysis, and the actual ways in which secularity contains material religious forms (such as defunct Christian buildings and discarded artefacts, or a missionary collection of indigenous spiritual artefacts kept in an ethnological museum) in ways that keep the religious alive and affective. New conceptual and methodological possibilities arise from taking the materiality of secularity seriously.

Birgit Meyer. “The Materiality of Secularity.“ In Material Secularities, special issue of Secular Studies 7, no. 2 (2025): 183–201.

This introduction to the special issue Material Secularities introduces our conceptualization of secularity as a principle of drawing boundaries through which the distinction between religious and non-religious becomes manifested. It calls detailed attention to the actual ways in which objects on the religion–secular boundary are re-signified and shifted into new spatial configurations, and the tensions and uncertainties that are entailed by these processes. We argue that such processes cannot be fully understood by returning to theories of social differentiation which tend to reify categorizations on a once and for all basis. What is needed is a material approach acknowledging that differentiation and signification are not merely abstract and unidirectional processes, but always work on and with tangible materials that constitute worlds of lived experience. This is what we seek to convey through the concept of material secularities.

Magnus Echtler, Birgit Meyer, and Nur Yasemin Ural, eds. Introduction to Material Secularities. Special issue of Secular Studies 7, no. 2 (2025): 175–82.

This contribution deals with the question of whether “Buddhism” was reified as an object of knowledge only as a result of it being studied by Western scholars, or whether it was already perceived as a collective entity by the social agents of the tradition before colonial encounter and independently of external observation. Premodern sources from China and Japan strongly indicate that the unity of the tradition founded by the Buddha was beyond question. Buddhists had a pronounced awareness that they belonged to a transregional community. Founded in India, the Buddhist monastic order spread in an unbroken succession of ordained practitioners. Authorised by genealogical succession, the order attended to the memory of the founder, and the preservation, transmission, and interpretation of his teachings. There were a number of emic concepts of representation and self-description. No Western scholarship was needed to construe “Buddhism” as an object.

Kleine, Christoph. “Who Invented Buddhism? Or: What Was Buddhism Before It Was Called Buddhism?” In Conceptualizing Islam: Current Approaches, edited by Frank Peter, Paula Schrode and Ricarda Stegmann, 44–58. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2025.

This paper takes a longue-durée perspective to show the different ways in which the Japanese have, in the course of history, identified a social sub-area that can be retrospectively (perhaps anachronistically) regarded as “religion.” In doing so, it makes a strong case that the classification of socially organized human activities serves specific purposes, and therefore varies greatly depending on the discursive context in which it occurs. In Japan, we find a variety of modes of distinction and classification that (from a modern perspective) distinguish “religion” from other integral activity bundles. Traditions that we consider to be religions, or that have evolved into religions in global modernity, have been defined as systems of cognitive and normative orientation, as nomospheres, as socio-cultural formations, as fields of knowledge, and as objects of law. With Japan’s entry into global modernity, we find, for the first time, a systematic juxtaposition of religion, on the one hand, with the state, science, or philosophy, on the other. An outstanding example of Japanese intellectuals’ appropriation of a globalized modern knowledge regime, with its division of social subsystems, is provided by the author Suzuki Daisetsu Teitarō, in his early work “New Theory of Religion,” from 1896. This text will be analysed in more detail, in an exploration of the historical continuities and discontinuities in the interpretation of social differentiation in Japan.

Kleine, Christoph. “Demarcating Religion: On the Varying Ways of Conceptualizing Social Differentiation in Japanese History.” In Historicizing Secular-Religious Demarcations: Interdisciplinary Contributions to Differentiation Theory. Special Issue of Zeitschrift Für Soziologie, edited by Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Daniel Witte and Christoph Kleine, 301–27. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.

Beyond the once dominant secularization thesis that anticipated the decline of religion in the modern era, the academic study of religion has in recent decades revisited secular as one of the factors that shape religion and religions in the globalized world. Against this theoretical backdrop, in this article, I use the case of South Korea to explore how secular and religion interact in contemporary global society. It focuses on describing the postcolonial reformulation of secularity and the corresponding transformation of religious diversity in Cold War South Korea. The Japanese colonial secularism rigidly banning the public and political engagement of religion was replaced by the flexible secular-religious divide after liberation of 1945. The porous mode of secularity extensively admitted religious entities to affect processes of postcolonial nation-building. Religious values, interests, and resources have been applied in motivating, pushing, and justifying South Koreans to devote themselves to developing the national community as a whole. Such a form of secularity became a critical condition that caused South Korea’s religious landscape to be reorganized in a vertical and unequal way. On the one hand, Buddhist and Christian populations grew remarkably in the liberated field of religion, while freedom of religion was recognized as a key ideological principle of the anticommunist country. On the other hand, folk beliefs and minority religious groups were often considered “superstitions”, “pseudo religions”, “heretics”, or even “evil religions”. With the pliable secularity at work, religious diversity was reconfigured hierarchically in the postcolonial society.

Kyuhoon Cho. "Porous Secularity: Religious Modernity and the Vertical Religious Diversity in Cold War South Korea." Religions 15, no. 8:893 (2024).

In order to trace pathways of secularisation and secularity in Africa this paper highlights a particular movement that carried great ideological weight at the time of most countries’ independence in the 1950s and 60s, namely African socialism. The development toward state secularism was structurally very similar throughout the continent independently of whether political leaders opted for the ‘West’ or the ‘East’ in the cold war. However, in opposition to Soviet ideology, African Socialism was famously antiatheist. With the wish to fend off Marxist atheism as a supposedly necessary aspect of socialism, ideologues in African socialism were among the few politicians in Africa even to address the place of religion in a secular state at all. The roots of African socialism can be traced to US-American Pan-Africanism as well as the interconnected colonial opposition movement grounded in Marxist anti-imperialism. Another argument focusses on the education of some prominent state leaders, such as Nyerere, Nkrumah, Touré and Senghor, to explain the importance of Christian mission schools and Islamic madrasahs as points of access to social, intellectual, and institutional participation in global anti-colonial movements. In the framework of one-party politics, state leaders called on (Pan-)African traditions, but ‘de-mystified’ them (Touré) in order to enhance African Socialism ‘as belief’ (Nyerere). In conclusion it is argued that state secularism in Africa at the time of independence, as demonstrated most visibly in African Socialism, is more about suppressing and/or balancing the traditional powers of religious leaders than about a fundamental critique of a religious way of life. In turn, the implicit association of socialism and Marxism with atheism needs further scrutiny in a global perspective.

Wilkens, Katharina. "African Socialism and Secular State Formation." Journal of Religion in Africa 54, 3 (2024): 326–56.

Raising timely and urgent questions about the forms, scope and boundaries of religious authority and practice, this article offers novel ways for the study of secularities and secularisms in contemporary African societies. In recent scholarly debates on secularity, Africa has been marginal. Part of the reason, it was suggested was that African ways of being in, and knowing, the world lay outside the religious-secular divide. We contest such positions. Secularism was clearly part of modernists colonial ideologies that called for the eradication of African beliefs described as backward and irrational. We find that the colonial encounter had a powerful historical impact, essentializing and othering African societies as marked by holistic indigenous cultures rather than differentiated religions. We suggest that the complex interplay of different African and European cultures has simultaneously shaped the social construction and historical development of multiple secularities. We propose that the concept of multiple secularities provides creative avenues to rethink religion, political authority and belonging. We consider secularities as contested arrangements of religious and other spheres whose dynamics include processes of de-differentiation and de-secularization.

Burchardt, Marian, Magnus Echtler and Katharina Wilkens. "Multiple Secularities in Africa – An Introduction." Journal of Religion in Africa 54, no. 3 (2024): 249–64.

In this chapter, we explore the ways in which religious communities, along with non-religious ones, produce particular emotional regimes through which they shape their members’ affective lives, produce knowledge on how to live with, endure and regulate certain emotions (e.g. pain and desire), and on how to make certain emotions as well as physical and mental state sufferable, as Geertz (1969) famously suggested. We pay particular attention to how religion and emotion have been theorized within the French and German sociological traditions, while also scrutinizing the contemporary assessments of these classical approaches. After this historical account and their relevance for secularization theory, we turn to recent studies that interpret religion and the secular within the framework of the affective turn that prioritizes embodiment, movement, practices, and spaces over individual feelings and beliefs in order to theorize the relationships between religion, emotion and institutions in relational and material ways.

Ural, Nur Yasemin, and Marian Burchardt. "What Emotions Teach Us About Religion: Sociological Approaches and the 'Affective Turn.'" In Research Handbook on the Sociology of Emotion, edited by Helena Flam, 329–55. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2024. 

This article explores the politics of cultural heritage in societies experiencing secularization and religious diversification by examining recent efforts made by Cordoba's Cathedral Chapter to emphasize the Christian origins and identity of the iconic Mosque-Cathedral. We argue that the Cathedral Chapter’s approach to managing and narrating the building over the past two decades responds largely to tensions stemming from the divergence between the primacy of its Islamic or multi-religious identity characteristic of popular representations of the building, both within Spain and beyond, on the one hand, and the primacy of the building’s Christian identity as manifested in the institutional arrangements concerning its ownership, management, and use, on the other. While this divergence has been a source of periodic tensions since the 1970s, such tensions have been amplified by recent symbolic acts and popular movements contesting the Church’s dominion over the Mosque-Cathedral, as well as by broader societal changes that have diminished the Church’s power and influence and heightened its sense of vulnerability. We identify and analyse four main strategies employed by the Catholic Church to (re)narrate the meaning of the building and assert its Christian roots and identity: (1) archaeological projects attempting to demonstrate its Christian foundations; (2) liturgical practices presenting it as a church to establish its Christian identity; (3) discursive practices framing Catholic traditions and rituals as ‘intangible heritage’ crucial to the building's successful preservation; and (4) the unconditional prohibition of Muslims from performing Islamic prayers. In our research, we have focused on the utilization of museological methods and the interweaving of diverse repertoires (scientific, artistic, religious), by Catholic actors, aimed authenticating and validating novel interpretations about the origin and Christian character of the building.

Griera, Mar, Avi Astor, and Marian Burchardt. “Performing Heritage at Cordoba’s Mosque-Cathedral.” Cultural Studies 38, no. 5 (2024): 815–38.