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Secular Studies Series
The Secular Paradox
A radically new way of understanding secularism which explains why being secular can seem so strangely religious
For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox , Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition.
Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits―the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States―show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity� in America today.
For much of America’s rapidly growing secular population, religion is an inescapable source of skepticism and discomfort. It shows up in politics and in holidays, but also in common events like weddings and funerals. In The Secular Paradox , Joseph Blankholm argues that, despite their desire to avoid religion, nonbelievers often seem religious because Christianity influences the culture around them so deeply. Relying on several years of ethnographic research among secular activists and organized nonbelievers in the United States, the volume explores how very secular people are ambivalent toward belief, community, ritual, conversion, and tradition. As they try to embrace what they share, secular people encounter, again and again, that they are becoming too religious. And as they reject religion, they feel they have lost too much. Trying to strike the right balance, secular people alternate between the two sides of their ambiguous condition: absolutely not religious and part of a religion-like secular tradition.
Blankholm relies heavily on the voices of women and people of color to understand what it means to live with the secular paradox. The struggles of secular misfits―the people who mis-fit normative secularism in the United States―show that becoming secular means rejecting parts of life that resemble Christianity and embracing a European tradition that emphasizes reason and avoids emotion. Women, people of color, and secular people who have left non-Christian religions work against the limits and contradictions of secularism to create new ways of being secular that are transforming the American religious landscape. They are pioneering the most interesting and important forms of secular “religiosity� in America today.
- GenresReligion
312 pages, Paperback
Published June 7, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 29, 2024
a book with a lot of value for understanding the diversity of non-religious people in the US, but also one lacking in a critical analysis of the concept of the secular and secularism. it does a lot to essentialize secular people and groups as a category of its own, but does not show us the historical genealogy of these ideas (which are, in many ways, indebted to protestantism). he is honest about his commitments as a secular person, but i’m not sure this honesty allows him to overcome this book being a bit of a secular apologetics in its own rite.
March 18, 2024
CENTRAL RESEARCH QUESTION:
What would an anthropology of secularism look like? Is there a secular discursive tradition and, if so, what would it look like?
THESIS or THESES:
Early in the introduction, Blankholm states that his book “makes sense of secular people’s strange ambivalence toward religion� (3). This ambivalence and paradox of the secular are demonstrated in the beliefs, communities, rituals, conversions, and traditions of secular people. Such people and their practices, Blankholm claims, illustrate a secular tension which vacillates from distain for religion to an embrace of something like it.
METHODS:
Ethnography, critical theory, anthropology.
SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT(S):
After noting the ambiguity and ambivalence that characterizes secular life in the United States, and how many, though not all, of the people therein come from bourgeois and white backgrounds, Blankholm’s introduction argues that the nonbeliever is one who lacks belief in God or the supernatural. This notion of nonbeliever as negative statement points to the strong gravitational pull and structural influence that Christianity retains. The words, concepts, and practices that permeate modernity are affected, though increasingly less so, by Christianity’s past. Yet, the life of secular people highlights how one can use Christianity’s gravitas to speak and be other than Christian. These introductory remarks allow readers to better understand the vastness and specificity of the subjects that are included in Blankholm’s ethnographic work. Such subjects in Blankholm’s ethnography, along with the theorists and philosophers who study atheism, understand, appreciate, and critique the positive and negative forms of atheism and non-belief. Crucially, Blankholm centers secular people who have been harmed by the way “secularism is a racializing and gendering formation that struggles to contain those who are not cisgendered white men� (22). Such people, for Blankholm demonstrate the horizons of what secularism can become. In other words, though the secular is indelibly influenced by religion, secular people strive to develop and embody ways of thinking and being that do more than let religion act as a structuring lacuna, a present absence. Such is the secular paradox.
Blankholm’s first chapter is an argument for and judgment of belief as “the fundamental paradox for nonbelievers� (25). Though a philosopher could elide this paradox, the ethnographer must confront it. Throughout this chapter, Blankholm shows that though some nonbelievers may state they have no beliefs, beliefs nonetheless matter to nonbelievers and their organizations. In part, Blankholm accounts for the ambiguity of believing nonbelievers by differentiating between believing in and believing that. After noting the vague, though perhaps humble and helpfully pragmatic way that many people do not believe in God but believe that there is a higher power, Blankholm defines and develops the many terms that secular people may or may not espouse. Without restating the uses of such terms, it’s worth mentioning that they commonly include freethinker, humanist (religious and secular), atheist, and agnostic. Highly contested, these terms are far from immune from racialized uses and associations. In answering this chapter’s leading question, Blankholm claims that if one understands nonbelievers as relying on faith alone, then that is inaccurate. However, if one understands the beliefs of nonbelievers as “assumptions that guide everyday action,� then that is more often correct (55).
Continuing with his study on the paradoxically religious motifs in secular life and thought, Blankholm’s second chapter addresses the term and concept of community. Like the ambivalence which characterized the relationship between nonbelievers and belief, belonging and community beget ambivalence. While some secular people join communities of likeminded people, others maintain that such communities are too religious in form. Some communities consist of humanist clergy, or Celebrants, who navigate the difficult terrain of avoiding religious pollution while functioning in a religious capacity. Many of these communities have high turnover rates and do not invest in their physical or legal infrastructure. Through describing the difficulties many secular communities share, Blankholm thoughtfully states “Christian-centered cultures can secularize without disrupting many of their fundamental assumptions about religion because the secular is an ambiguous simulacrum of Christianity; it is both its inverse and its doppelgänger, though it is important not to conflate the two� (72). Keeping with the broader theme of his book, Blankholm demonstrates the importance of identity-based secular communities, as such communities are refuges for the misfits of secular movements and groups. Focusing on humanistic Jews and secular communities for Hispanics, Black people, and Muslims, Blankholm argues that these communities are finding new and important ways to be secular. For example, the humanistic Jewish people that Blankholm conversed with attest to their distinctly Jewish form of secularism. Such Jewish secularism draws from a longer tradition of Jewish materialism and monism. Hispanic secularists also must navigate their culture’s connection with Catholicism and the various forms of expression and association not commonly practiced in white secular communities. Relatedly, the Black secular communities that Blankholm studies traverse the difficult terrain of being assumed to be religious. These difficulties for identity-based groups demonstrate the generative paradox of secular life in the United States.
The third chapter is Blankholm’s study on ritual. Beginning with a description of a largely secular community celebration DÃa de los muertos, Blankholm demonstrates how nonbelievers view ritual as human need that should be reserved for exclusively religious practice and use. This relation with ritual shows how nonbelievers reject “religion but grabs hold of it too, while affirming a secular way of lifeâ€� (107). From wedding ceremonies to memorial services, secular ritual vacillates from rejecting out-of-hand religious language and practices while also pragmatically recognizing that quasi-religious language is occasionally welcomed and requested by otherwise secular people. Yet, at the base of secular people’s relationship with ritual is a certain theory of ritual. In conversation with several scholars of religion, Blankholm argues that secular people’s understanding and practice of ritual are a type of purification. Such a secular purification of ritual makes “it possible for secular people to participate in religion without compromising their secularityâ€� (142). Throughout the chapter, Blankholm claims that avoiding, blaspheming, abstracting, and translating are modes of purification that allow secular people to address and use ritual and religion. Avoiding, profaning, abstracting, and translating religious forms of expression into secular practice is more than secular people living in the remainder of religion, it is a constructive move that begets norms distinct form religion. However, such modes of purification attest to the secular paradox insofar as nonbelievers and their practices are haunted by religion. This haunting is evident when either silence follows an individual in a secular community sneezing or when a moment of silence is observed. Importantly, Blankholm’s notion of haunting is not in the idealist a/theological tradition which “transposes, decontextualizes, and recontextualizes elements of the religious into a secular framework in order to demonstrate how Christianity haunts the secular but also to make Christianity ventriloquize secularismâ€� (n.34, p. 244-245). Rather, this haunting is understood in an empiricist sense which, through flipping and blaspheming religion, makes the secular religious and vice versa.
The topic of secular conversion preoccupies Blankholm’s fourth chapter. However, the chapter also examines how secular ethics, which Blankholm “found inseparable from the question of conversion,� are multifaceted in their commitments and assumptions (148). Through a lengthy engagement with Peter Boghossian, Blankholm contends that, for some, creating more secular people is assumed to create a better world, as secular ethics are thought to be intrinsically connected to issues of social justice. For others, the secular is distinct from question of social justice and creating more secular people would not result in an increase of people dedicated to social justice. For Blankholm, “the fundamental question of secular conversion is whether a person becomes secular merely by leaving religion or whether they must also translate themselves into a new discourse, adopting a secular worldview and way of life� (184). On that point, Blankholm argues that insofar as skepticism and empiricism are grounding epistemologies for most secular people, secular people vary on the question of secular conversion being either a leap of faith into a new life or a simple product of empirically observing what can be known. Secular issues such as conversion and ethics are complicated and made more difficult by the secular’s longer tradition of skepticism towards authority� “who are you to tell me what to do?� Nevertheless, atheists of color at times insist on a deep and meaningful connection between social justice and atheism, while other atheists of color are less optimistic about secular conversion being a pro-justice process. However, more often than not, secular relations with the question of conversion resemble proselytizing more than converting. Such proselytizing is commonly done through either naming one’s secular identity, raising awareness about the presence of atheism in America, or by unifying disparate nonbelievers under one umbrella.
Blankholm’s final chapter on tradition begins with a bewildering and revelatory visit to First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis. In recounting this visit, Blankholm notes how it occasioned the possibility to think that there is a secular tradition. For Blankholm, this secular discursive tradition is not characterized by an unanimously shared worldview, but by its paradoxes. The chapter continues with Blankholm summarizing Mason Olds’s portrayal of religious humanism as having early types in ancient Greek thought, Renaissance humanism, early 20th century literary humanism, Nietzschean humanism, and Naturalistic. These disparate though theoretically related humanisms act as the wells from which Olds draws his religious humanism. However, this humanist tradition, Blankholm notes, is characteristically white and male. In order to go beyond this narrow, white, and androcentric construal of secular thought, Blankholm shows how some nontheists have expanded the tradition and definition of humanism to further include nontheist women and nontheist of color. Similar to the authors who have aimed to expand the humanist tradition, Blankholm argues for “a secular discursive tradition that is broader than the humanist tradition and defined by its persistent questions and disagreements rather than a single worldview or even orientation� (196). Taking his notion of discursive tradition from Asad, who held that the secular is a break with tradition, Blankholm traces and, as a scholar practitioner, constitutes a secular tradition. This secular tradition, for Blankholm, extends beyond the predominantly liberal and positivist tradition of secularism in the United States. In one sense, conflict and debate over intellectual principles and bodily practices is what characterizes this secular tradition. In another sense, modern atheism does draw from sources other than the Enlightenment, such as Lucretius, Epicureanism, and, later, critical theory. As Blankholm states, “Epicurus, after all, antedates Christ� (209). The intertwining of the secular and religious, both in history and in thought, are evident of an a/theology, a movement beyond the strict categorization of the religious and the secular. With this in mind, Blankholm returns to studying the Secular Jewish Tradition, Muslimish Tradition, and secular Native Americans as demonstrative of the bodily and intellectual difficulties and paradoxes faced by secular’s misfits. Such misfit experiences demand, as Blankholm earlier developed, a broader and more expansive secular discursive tradition. In more ways than one, Blankholm argues that this subterranean tradition of the secular means that many non-secular people are implicitly influenced by the secularity of the secular.
In an eloquent reading of Don Quixote, Blankholm’s epilogue argues for not understanding the secular as essentially religious or not. An empirical fact of the secular, states Blankholm, is that it is both a religion and not a religion.
It’s evident and commendable that Blankholm has been interpellated by the secular tradition, especially the misfits of that tradition. Striving to represent such people accurately and fairly, Blankholm demonstrates that construing the secular tradition as distinctly post-Enlightenment and solely male, liberal, and white is to misconstrue a much longer and more diverse secular tradition.
The Secular Paradox is clearly written and nicely takes the reader on a journey through the secular in the United States. Even at its most theoretically intense moments, there is a lucidity and relevance that forcefully grounds the text.
There is an issue with condemning the secular as guilty by highlighting its association with Protestantism. Indeed, this book reaffirms why such condemnation-by-association obscures more than it reveals. However, I remain confused about the inverse operation of such condemnation-by-association. That is, what do we make of praising-by-association? Is it enough to demonstrate one thinker has an association, either genealogically or theoretically, with the secular and to therefore place them within a longer tradition of the secular? Especially at the expense of, perhaps, overlooking much stronger and clearer convictions a certain thinker may have had? Can we associate Calvin's atomism with a secular impulse in such a way that doesn’t suggest the secular lurks behind all intellectual production? All of this is to say, if we deride the purification practice of condemnation-by-association, then what intellectual moves do we need to make to laud the practice of praising-by-association?
As someone who is an atheist and doggedly materialist, I wondered why I did not identify with the subjects of Blankholm’s ethnography. After reflecting on this phenomenon, I noticed that the question of belief is not entirely important to me. Instead, I find that my atheism and materialism lead me to more directly political questions, such as communism, a politics of refusal, and the like. Of course, Blankholm highlights Marx and communism in several places; however, I wonder what would powerfully make the secular tradition both relatable to and more inclusive of those who have long since held there are no gods or masters. This is an open question in the sense that many of my comrades on the Left rarely, if ever, accentuate their atheism. Rather, most intellectual energy is devoted to directly political and social issues. Which is to say, how can began to think of the secular in such a way that is less concerned with questions of belief (which nonetheless do matter!) and associate it with a variety of left political practices and theories?
Blankholm’s book is, in part, a resistance to a priori definitions of the secular and its cognates, as such definitions overlook a given context and setting. However, it is fair to say that the secular, for Blankholm, is in most times and places, intertwined with atheism, agnosticism, and/or a materialist epistemology and ontology. Importantly, the secular is also accompanied by bodily practices that both negate theism and affirm ‘this world� as the whole of reality.
What would an anthropology of secularism look like? Is there a secular discursive tradition and, if so, what would it look like?
THESIS or THESES:
Early in the introduction, Blankholm states that his book “makes sense of secular people’s strange ambivalence toward religion� (3). This ambivalence and paradox of the secular are demonstrated in the beliefs, communities, rituals, conversions, and traditions of secular people. Such people and their practices, Blankholm claims, illustrate a secular tension which vacillates from distain for religion to an embrace of something like it.
METHODS:
Ethnography, critical theory, anthropology.
SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT(S):
After noting the ambiguity and ambivalence that characterizes secular life in the United States, and how many, though not all, of the people therein come from bourgeois and white backgrounds, Blankholm’s introduction argues that the nonbeliever is one who lacks belief in God or the supernatural. This notion of nonbeliever as negative statement points to the strong gravitational pull and structural influence that Christianity retains. The words, concepts, and practices that permeate modernity are affected, though increasingly less so, by Christianity’s past. Yet, the life of secular people highlights how one can use Christianity’s gravitas to speak and be other than Christian. These introductory remarks allow readers to better understand the vastness and specificity of the subjects that are included in Blankholm’s ethnographic work. Such subjects in Blankholm’s ethnography, along with the theorists and philosophers who study atheism, understand, appreciate, and critique the positive and negative forms of atheism and non-belief. Crucially, Blankholm centers secular people who have been harmed by the way “secularism is a racializing and gendering formation that struggles to contain those who are not cisgendered white men� (22). Such people, for Blankholm demonstrate the horizons of what secularism can become. In other words, though the secular is indelibly influenced by religion, secular people strive to develop and embody ways of thinking and being that do more than let religion act as a structuring lacuna, a present absence. Such is the secular paradox.
Blankholm’s first chapter is an argument for and judgment of belief as “the fundamental paradox for nonbelievers� (25). Though a philosopher could elide this paradox, the ethnographer must confront it. Throughout this chapter, Blankholm shows that though some nonbelievers may state they have no beliefs, beliefs nonetheless matter to nonbelievers and their organizations. In part, Blankholm accounts for the ambiguity of believing nonbelievers by differentiating between believing in and believing that. After noting the vague, though perhaps humble and helpfully pragmatic way that many people do not believe in God but believe that there is a higher power, Blankholm defines and develops the many terms that secular people may or may not espouse. Without restating the uses of such terms, it’s worth mentioning that they commonly include freethinker, humanist (religious and secular), atheist, and agnostic. Highly contested, these terms are far from immune from racialized uses and associations. In answering this chapter’s leading question, Blankholm claims that if one understands nonbelievers as relying on faith alone, then that is inaccurate. However, if one understands the beliefs of nonbelievers as “assumptions that guide everyday action,� then that is more often correct (55).
Continuing with his study on the paradoxically religious motifs in secular life and thought, Blankholm’s second chapter addresses the term and concept of community. Like the ambivalence which characterized the relationship between nonbelievers and belief, belonging and community beget ambivalence. While some secular people join communities of likeminded people, others maintain that such communities are too religious in form. Some communities consist of humanist clergy, or Celebrants, who navigate the difficult terrain of avoiding religious pollution while functioning in a religious capacity. Many of these communities have high turnover rates and do not invest in their physical or legal infrastructure. Through describing the difficulties many secular communities share, Blankholm thoughtfully states “Christian-centered cultures can secularize without disrupting many of their fundamental assumptions about religion because the secular is an ambiguous simulacrum of Christianity; it is both its inverse and its doppelgänger, though it is important not to conflate the two� (72). Keeping with the broader theme of his book, Blankholm demonstrates the importance of identity-based secular communities, as such communities are refuges for the misfits of secular movements and groups. Focusing on humanistic Jews and secular communities for Hispanics, Black people, and Muslims, Blankholm argues that these communities are finding new and important ways to be secular. For example, the humanistic Jewish people that Blankholm conversed with attest to their distinctly Jewish form of secularism. Such Jewish secularism draws from a longer tradition of Jewish materialism and monism. Hispanic secularists also must navigate their culture’s connection with Catholicism and the various forms of expression and association not commonly practiced in white secular communities. Relatedly, the Black secular communities that Blankholm studies traverse the difficult terrain of being assumed to be religious. These difficulties for identity-based groups demonstrate the generative paradox of secular life in the United States.
The third chapter is Blankholm’s study on ritual. Beginning with a description of a largely secular community celebration DÃa de los muertos, Blankholm demonstrates how nonbelievers view ritual as human need that should be reserved for exclusively religious practice and use. This relation with ritual shows how nonbelievers reject “religion but grabs hold of it too, while affirming a secular way of lifeâ€� (107). From wedding ceremonies to memorial services, secular ritual vacillates from rejecting out-of-hand religious language and practices while also pragmatically recognizing that quasi-religious language is occasionally welcomed and requested by otherwise secular people. Yet, at the base of secular people’s relationship with ritual is a certain theory of ritual. In conversation with several scholars of religion, Blankholm argues that secular people’s understanding and practice of ritual are a type of purification. Such a secular purification of ritual makes “it possible for secular people to participate in religion without compromising their secularityâ€� (142). Throughout the chapter, Blankholm claims that avoiding, blaspheming, abstracting, and translating are modes of purification that allow secular people to address and use ritual and religion. Avoiding, profaning, abstracting, and translating religious forms of expression into secular practice is more than secular people living in the remainder of religion, it is a constructive move that begets norms distinct form religion. However, such modes of purification attest to the secular paradox insofar as nonbelievers and their practices are haunted by religion. This haunting is evident when either silence follows an individual in a secular community sneezing or when a moment of silence is observed. Importantly, Blankholm’s notion of haunting is not in the idealist a/theological tradition which “transposes, decontextualizes, and recontextualizes elements of the religious into a secular framework in order to demonstrate how Christianity haunts the secular but also to make Christianity ventriloquize secularismâ€� (n.34, p. 244-245). Rather, this haunting is understood in an empiricist sense which, through flipping and blaspheming religion, makes the secular religious and vice versa.
The topic of secular conversion preoccupies Blankholm’s fourth chapter. However, the chapter also examines how secular ethics, which Blankholm “found inseparable from the question of conversion,� are multifaceted in their commitments and assumptions (148). Through a lengthy engagement with Peter Boghossian, Blankholm contends that, for some, creating more secular people is assumed to create a better world, as secular ethics are thought to be intrinsically connected to issues of social justice. For others, the secular is distinct from question of social justice and creating more secular people would not result in an increase of people dedicated to social justice. For Blankholm, “the fundamental question of secular conversion is whether a person becomes secular merely by leaving religion or whether they must also translate themselves into a new discourse, adopting a secular worldview and way of life� (184). On that point, Blankholm argues that insofar as skepticism and empiricism are grounding epistemologies for most secular people, secular people vary on the question of secular conversion being either a leap of faith into a new life or a simple product of empirically observing what can be known. Secular issues such as conversion and ethics are complicated and made more difficult by the secular’s longer tradition of skepticism towards authority� “who are you to tell me what to do?� Nevertheless, atheists of color at times insist on a deep and meaningful connection between social justice and atheism, while other atheists of color are less optimistic about secular conversion being a pro-justice process. However, more often than not, secular relations with the question of conversion resemble proselytizing more than converting. Such proselytizing is commonly done through either naming one’s secular identity, raising awareness about the presence of atheism in America, or by unifying disparate nonbelievers under one umbrella.
Blankholm’s final chapter on tradition begins with a bewildering and revelatory visit to First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis. In recounting this visit, Blankholm notes how it occasioned the possibility to think that there is a secular tradition. For Blankholm, this secular discursive tradition is not characterized by an unanimously shared worldview, but by its paradoxes. The chapter continues with Blankholm summarizing Mason Olds’s portrayal of religious humanism as having early types in ancient Greek thought, Renaissance humanism, early 20th century literary humanism, Nietzschean humanism, and Naturalistic. These disparate though theoretically related humanisms act as the wells from which Olds draws his religious humanism. However, this humanist tradition, Blankholm notes, is characteristically white and male. In order to go beyond this narrow, white, and androcentric construal of secular thought, Blankholm shows how some nontheists have expanded the tradition and definition of humanism to further include nontheist women and nontheist of color. Similar to the authors who have aimed to expand the humanist tradition, Blankholm argues for “a secular discursive tradition that is broader than the humanist tradition and defined by its persistent questions and disagreements rather than a single worldview or even orientation� (196). Taking his notion of discursive tradition from Asad, who held that the secular is a break with tradition, Blankholm traces and, as a scholar practitioner, constitutes a secular tradition. This secular tradition, for Blankholm, extends beyond the predominantly liberal and positivist tradition of secularism in the United States. In one sense, conflict and debate over intellectual principles and bodily practices is what characterizes this secular tradition. In another sense, modern atheism does draw from sources other than the Enlightenment, such as Lucretius, Epicureanism, and, later, critical theory. As Blankholm states, “Epicurus, after all, antedates Christ� (209). The intertwining of the secular and religious, both in history and in thought, are evident of an a/theology, a movement beyond the strict categorization of the religious and the secular. With this in mind, Blankholm returns to studying the Secular Jewish Tradition, Muslimish Tradition, and secular Native Americans as demonstrative of the bodily and intellectual difficulties and paradoxes faced by secular’s misfits. Such misfit experiences demand, as Blankholm earlier developed, a broader and more expansive secular discursive tradition. In more ways than one, Blankholm argues that this subterranean tradition of the secular means that many non-secular people are implicitly influenced by the secularity of the secular.
In an eloquent reading of Don Quixote, Blankholm’s epilogue argues for not understanding the secular as essentially religious or not. An empirical fact of the secular, states Blankholm, is that it is both a religion and not a religion.
It’s evident and commendable that Blankholm has been interpellated by the secular tradition, especially the misfits of that tradition. Striving to represent such people accurately and fairly, Blankholm demonstrates that construing the secular tradition as distinctly post-Enlightenment and solely male, liberal, and white is to misconstrue a much longer and more diverse secular tradition.
The Secular Paradox is clearly written and nicely takes the reader on a journey through the secular in the United States. Even at its most theoretically intense moments, there is a lucidity and relevance that forcefully grounds the text.
There is an issue with condemning the secular as guilty by highlighting its association with Protestantism. Indeed, this book reaffirms why such condemnation-by-association obscures more than it reveals. However, I remain confused about the inverse operation of such condemnation-by-association. That is, what do we make of praising-by-association? Is it enough to demonstrate one thinker has an association, either genealogically or theoretically, with the secular and to therefore place them within a longer tradition of the secular? Especially at the expense of, perhaps, overlooking much stronger and clearer convictions a certain thinker may have had? Can we associate Calvin's atomism with a secular impulse in such a way that doesn’t suggest the secular lurks behind all intellectual production? All of this is to say, if we deride the purification practice of condemnation-by-association, then what intellectual moves do we need to make to laud the practice of praising-by-association?
As someone who is an atheist and doggedly materialist, I wondered why I did not identify with the subjects of Blankholm’s ethnography. After reflecting on this phenomenon, I noticed that the question of belief is not entirely important to me. Instead, I find that my atheism and materialism lead me to more directly political questions, such as communism, a politics of refusal, and the like. Of course, Blankholm highlights Marx and communism in several places; however, I wonder what would powerfully make the secular tradition both relatable to and more inclusive of those who have long since held there are no gods or masters. This is an open question in the sense that many of my comrades on the Left rarely, if ever, accentuate their atheism. Rather, most intellectual energy is devoted to directly political and social issues. Which is to say, how can began to think of the secular in such a way that is less concerned with questions of belief (which nonetheless do matter!) and associate it with a variety of left political practices and theories?
Blankholm’s book is, in part, a resistance to a priori definitions of the secular and its cognates, as such definitions overlook a given context and setting. However, it is fair to say that the secular, for Blankholm, is in most times and places, intertwined with atheism, agnosticism, and/or a materialist epistemology and ontology. Importantly, the secular is also accompanied by bodily practices that both negate theism and affirm ‘this world� as the whole of reality.
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