Introduction

The postcolonial signifies a historical period, an oppositional stance, or both. It is the time after colonialism, or it is the struggle against colonialism. As always, the descriptive and normative intermingle. Colonialism does not simply end; it ends through struggle. That struggle shapes the time after colonialism: the institutions, values, and political landscape that remain once formal colonial control has ceased. Of course, colonial control itself is not so simple. It is not reducible to formal political mechanisms but is inextricable from the economic and the cultural. Struggle against economic and cultural hegemony is an aspect of postcolonial political struggle before and after the moment of independence, even as the terrain of struggle shifts. There has always been struggle, for colonial hegemony is never total. The postcolonial during colonialism names that spirit of struggle, that resistance encountered by the colonial order, and those lives animated by a future outside of the horizon of the present, lives illegible to contemporary elites. Fetishizing the moment of independence, fixing the temporal division between the colonial and the postcolonial, is clearly a political maneuver, or better an anti-political maneuver, masking the myriad fields in which political hegemony operates and so allowing that hegemony to persist.

If the postcolonial is understood as a historical period, the flourishing religiosity found in the postcolonial world makes us think that there is, indeed, something about the postcolonial that is inherently postsecular. We might examine how the ideologies and practices of secularism and colonialism are intertwined, and how the collapse of the latter necessarily results in the collapse of the former. Or, we might understand postcolonial religiosity, particularly in forms that appear almost perverse to the eyes of the West, to be a symptom of the vestigial colonial control of reason and affect. If the postcolonial is understood, rather, as an oppositional stance articulated differently in different historical contexts, these lines of inquiry remain salient, but they are joined by another set of normative responses offered by theorists of the postcolonial. For such theorists, religion is to be praised and to be condemned. Religion as inextricable from culture, from colonial culture (and economics, values, and institutions), is to be condemned as part of the struggle against colonialism. Yet this spirit of struggle named by the postcolonial itself has something of the religious about it: haunting, visioning an eschaton, disrupting worldly order. Note that this potential embrace of the religious is not the embrace of specific religious traditions, values, or institutions. The postcolonial does not sing the praises of indigenous religion against the missionary enterprise – at least not too quickly. When the postcolonial names struggle, the postcolonial critic extols tools of struggle, but does so pragmatically. Here, now, this religious practice or tradition aids in oppositional work. Here, now, this religious practice or tradition helps to build linkages between oppositional elements that may have the potential to break colonial hegemony. Indeed, this understanding of the postcolonial seems to wholeheartedly embrace a sophisticated form of secularism. Religion is allowable if it is not linked with the rest of the social world, if it is relegated to an instrumental role, a tool of the true struggle: the struggle against colonialism. Such a position may be embraced even as secularism – naïve secularism – is disavowed: exclusion or management of religion that mimics the colonial order (understood as the paradigm of secularism, as rationalism unlimited) is clearly condemnable from the postcolonial perspective.

Such ambivalence marks postcolonial theory as it thinks about religion and secularism. Ambivalence that once smoldered has lit up as an explicit site of contest as religion and secularism are on the minds of many across the critical humanities. The influence of Marxism on scholarly conversations about the postcolonial once muted interest in religion, despite the clear presence of religion in lives and worlds dominated by colonial regimes. Also, the rise of postcolonial theory, in the final decades of the twentieth century, coincided with a period of particularly strident secularism in the Western academy. As the conversation developed, the more subtle theoretical resources of Gramsci offered a way of thinking about the (pragmatic) oppositional potential of cultural resources, including religion, and the way culture, economics and politics entwine (Chatterjee, 2010; Novetzke, 2006). Yet whether considering religion simply as one element of “culture” takes religion seriously is an open question. What of the distinctive institutions, dispositions, ethics, and dreams cultivated by religion?

As postcolonial theory incorporated the insights of deconstruction, the goal of amplifying the voices of the voiceless lost appeal. It meant an unwitting embrace of the metaphysics of presence. Making the excluded present meant making those excluded subject to the order of the day – to the new, postcolonial order. Now, the project of postcolonial theory, and of postcolonial scholarly practice more broadly, became extoling disjunctures, failures in the colonial order, sites where translation exposes its own impossibility (e.g., Spivak, 1999). Rather than amplifying the voice of the subaltern, the postcolonial scholar could teach the West how to hear the voices of the subaltern, how to listen for voices that the colonial order does not train us to hear. By the start of the twenty-first century, deconstruction was turning to religion to label these disjunctures, and so was postcolonial theory. Most famously, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) urged scholars to allow the agency of “gods and spirits” to enter their scholarship, disrupting the representational practices taught by Western epistemic regimes. Yet, the worry persists that this is but a sophisticated secularism, pragmatically using the religious for political ends without engaging with the specificity of the religious.

Developments in postcolonial theory have often been pushed forward by studies of South Asia, and in this context, it would seem that religion is unavoidable. Yet often here religion is rightly portrayed as inextricably linked with social life more generally, the religious element of antagonisms elided or described as “intercommunal.” More recently, scholars of South Asia have interrogated the ways in which secularism in the region (with the “tolerance,” read management, of religion that often accompanies it) positions itself as oppositional to excessive, uncontrolled religiosity – and so advances the interests of elites (Bhargava, 2000). Concretely, both the Hindu nationalism of the BJP and the secularism of Congress do violence to the complexity of ordinary Indians’ lives. Postcolonial theorists have attempted to imagine what enchanted secularism might look like, or secular religiosity – grasping for a way to escape the religious–secular binary (a binary defined by secularism) (e.g., Bilgrami, 2014). But while this move toward the “postsecular” attempts to break a binary in political rhetoric, it does not always interrogate the richness of religious traditions, the ways these traditions have been distorted by colonialism, and the way these traditions remain entwined with postcolonial political regimes.

Two further developments in the scholarship closely tied to postcolonial theory promise new approaches to thinking the postcolonial and the postsecular together. A scholarly conversation is emerging that examines the intersection of colonialism, Christianity, and race – particularly race organized around categories of black and white (Carter, 2013; Hickman, 2010; Jennings, 2010). Colonialism and Christianity have long been linked – iconically, the missionary, the soldier, and the merchant working in coordination – but in recent years there has been particular attention paid to the way that religious and racial categories come into being at the same time, and how the colonial encounter is decisive for their formation. In other words, colonialism makes Europe realize that it has Christianity as a religion and whiteness as a race, and that others do not (Stoler, 2002). Postcolonial struggle, from this perspective, necessarily involves reworking the religious and racial ideas born in and secured through colonialism.

A second related development in postcolonial scholarship involves the burgeoning interest in settler colonialism as a distinctive, and particularly invidious, species of colonialism (e.g., Goldstein and Lubin, 2008). The turn to settler colonialism focuses a spotlight on the United States and Israel as paradigmatic cases; earlier, South Africa and Ireland attracted particular attention (Akenson, 1992). As these examples suggest, the critical examination of settler colonialism touches a particularly sensitive nerve, one that implicates “us” in an injustice with no easy solution. From this perspective, postcolonial struggle does not just mean lauding peasant insurrections and boycotting Monsanto; it means returning US private property to Native Americans and boycotting Israeli universities. Moreover, settler colonialism is very often fueled by religious narratives such as those of chosen people, exile, holy land, cities on hills. In a sense, it would seem that secularism is precisely the antidote to the use of such religious narratives in support of colonial and neocolonial projects, particularly if secularism is seen as arising from a context where a people’s relationship to a land is not precarious. But if religion is used to label that which secures the relationship of a people to a land, is not a great deal of the complexity of religion, and of the category “religion,” lost?

To think this complexity and robustness, it is natural to turn to the burgeoning interest in religion across the critical humanities – to what might be called postsecular studies. Postcolonial studies arose a generation after the end of colonialism as scholars grasped for a language to describe colonialism without eliding the most marginalized. Postsecular studies is arising to challenge the stark opposition between a secular West and a religious “other” that was hyperpoliticized in the aftermath of September 11. This opposition leaned on a narrative of secularization in the modern West, a narrative postsecular studies scholars challenge for both its oversimplification of the West (diverse, and still quite religious) and its silence on the rest of the world, a silence that is implicitly pathologizing. The scholars central to the field – Talal Asad (1993, 2003) in anthropology, Jose Casanova (1994) in sociology, Charles Taylor (2007) in the history of ideas, and Jürgen Habermas (2008) in philosophy – denaturalize the secular in various ways, exploring its origins, its limitations, its political ramifications, and the power by which it is maintained.

As many critics have pointed out, Taylor’s exposition of how religious belief shifts, in five hundred years, from being taken for granted to being one option among many, and requiring justification, is a Western European story (e.g., Warner et al., 2010). Not only does Taylor omit the development of secularity outside of Western Europe, he also omits the role of the European encounter with the rest of the world in the formation of Europe itself, including its role in the formation of European secularity. Indeed, “encounter” is too modest a word to mark the ongoing, often decisive exchanges between Europe and the rest of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, not to mention North America. Taylor’s focus on the European social imaginary results in reproducing precisely the repressions constitutive of that social imaginary, and that which is repressed often has the strongest hold on us – in this case, on what we mean by the secular and the postsecular.

While Talal Asad agrees with Taylor that secularity has a contingent history and is maintained by specific practices and institutions, for Asad more than Taylor, power is a crucial concept here. Asad also urges attentiveness to the way that secularity distorts religion. This distortion occurs both in the self-understanding of religious communities and in the scholarly study of religion. Asad studies such distortions at the heart of Europe, in the disciplinary practices of medieval Christianity, but also in the colonial and postcolonial world. For example, Asad demonstrates how the import of ostensibly secular European legal codes into Egypt restructured the functioning of sharia itself. Sharia became a “sacred” law that was instrumental in establishing the private sphere of the family. Yet, at the same time, Egyptian traditions of legal debate that incorporated the agency of human reasoning were lost in this legal privatization. The sacralizing of the law – by putting it beyond the purview of public reason and debate – was a consequence of European-Egyptian modernizations. Religion in postcolonial contexts must be read through the distorting lens of secularism; scholars must focus their study not on the object religion but on those distortions. Asad’s work has inspired a host of studies on how secularity was articulated in postcolonial contexts, yet much of this scholarship sidesteps the imperative animating postcolonial theory: to further the struggle against colonialism by retrieving the voices of the disenfranchised.

Another area of research in postsecular studies attends to religious movements squarely opposed to the secularity of the West. Such movements are, from the perspective of the secular West, reduced to being the products of irrationality or false consciousness. They are not treated as having genuine religion, and so not worthy of inclusion in the religious pluralism that is another aspect of Western secularism, the framework through which religion is managed. Recent scholarship has shown how, even while appropriating some of the technologies of the secular West, oppositional religious movements involve participants’ minds and bodies in distinctive, sophisticated ways – in ways just as sophisticated as religions more palatable to the West. Saba Mahmood (2005) explores the agency of devout Muslim women in Cairo, women who use their piety to advance their personal interests within their families but who also are committed to inhabiting the norms of orthodox Islam. Her analysis presents a case of a movement that consciously opposes what the participants see as Western secularity and restores the agency to women whom Western feminists assumed to be hopelessly oppressed. She allows us to see the productive entanglements of inherited and contemporary practices of religion and politics. Such scholarship extols spaces where Western models of secular modernity are challenged, by-passed, or fused with distinctive local responses to modernization. Yet, such scholarship often is so invested in a contrast between the secularism of the West (and its postcolonial proxies) and the oppositionality of the religious that the lessons of postcolonial studies scholarship are often forgotten. The “gods and spirits” celebrated by Chakrabarty move from being markers of the untranslatable to the lauded result of successful translation. In all of this, we see the problematic nature of the category of “the religious” as alleged opposition to the secular.

Indeed, for over three decades now scholars in the history and theory of religion have argued that the modern concept of religion has deep roots in colonialism and that it does not simply describe a universal entity but is shaped by, and shapes, particular political realities (Asad, 1993; Boyarin, 2004; Chidester, 1996; Fitzgerald 2007; McCutcheon, 2001). Let us summarize three central points in these texts. First, the modern concept of religion emerges out of the conflicts of colonialism. The claim that African cultures have no religion legitimized colonial aggression in South Africa. The contention that these cultures have religious practices but that they are defective and inferior to English Protestant Christianity was then part of the legitimization of colonial rule. In rejecting this colonial use of religion, we can find in postcolonial societies a new middle-class practice of religion. This practice took form in explicit opposition to the religion of the hitherto dominant elites, who were derided as ineffectual because of their lack of resistance against the colonial regime or as corrupt because of their collaboration with it. Consequently, new religious authorities appeared and middle-class lay people, who did not attend established institutions of traditional cultural education, made claims about religious authenticity.

Second, under the influence of the emerging category of religion, the contours of normative religious practice and doctrine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shifted. For example, baptismal practices and theologies in Switzerland changed with the rise of the modern nation-state (Vial, 2004), and in Sri Lanka the new middle-class elite reshaped Buddhist practice in support of an emerging national identity in the late colonial and early postcolonial period (Tambiah, 1992). The modern provenance of the concept of religion suggests that it is a concept that is epistemically misleading and ethically problematic. “Religion” misleads since it does not refer to any truly universal phenomenon. Instead, religion universalizes a particular parochial configuration and thus imposes an alien and alienating order of knowledge-power onto societies and phenomena under the sway of Western colonial power. As Tomoko Masuzawa has put it, the concept of religion gives a new lease to the logic of European hegemony (2005: xiv).

Third, this scholarship interrogating the concept of religion does not argue that religion is being transformed in modernity. Rather, religion is produced together with the very disciplines that also shape the secular state – the particularly modern invasive state form that Foucault labels governmentality. While conversations about “political theology” have often focused on sovereignty, in modernity, it is life itself that becomes an interest of the state, and it is regarding issues of life itself that religion is entangled with the modern state. Here, religion is also clearly entangled with sexuality, race, and other aspects of governmentality. (While the articles in this collection do not dwell on these connections, their methodological commitments make visible these links.) Yet an analysis of governmentality must also be inflected by the entanglement of modernity and colonialism, an entanglement largely ignored by Foucault. Colonialism offered a proving ground for techniques of population management and of the management of religion.

In this context, it appears that “religion” is without a global referent. As a particular modern discourse embedded in colonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial productions of politics and power, religion refers to the material, textual, and epistemic effects of this discourse. Thus, “religion” is part of what Masuzawa (2005: 282) calls processes of “colonial self-articulation.” Here colonial categories and institutions are adapted and shaped so that they can be used first for resistance against the colonizing regime and second for the building of postcolonial nations. Consequently, religion does not function like a natural kind word, but it does refer to globally produced political realities. In addition, religion reflects multiplicities of contestations.

In sum, often scholars studying secularism have not paid sufficient attention to postcolonial contexts and critiques and scholars studying the postcolonial have not paid sufficient attention to the complexities of religion. The purpose of the articles that follow is to offer a remedy: to bring these two conversations together and to show how their confluence can illumine. Each article in different ways implicitly draws connections between the insights of these two theoretical discourses. Here is one way of making those connections explicit, though not necessarily a formulation to which all of the authors would accede, that secularism, colonialism, and modernity are inextricably linked (see Wynter, 2003). Put all too briefly: studies of the postsecular have demonstrated the link between the secular and the modern. Studies of the postcolonial have demonstrated the linkage between the colonial and the modern. Reading the postsecular and the postcolonial together, a linked triad of the colonial, the secular, and the modern takes shape, although it is a triad that tempts misreading. For it is tempting to read each of the three elements as temporally discrete, and so it is tempting to embrace a grand “post” that supersedes them. Moreover, it is tempting to moralize this grand “post”: it is the overcoming of all evil, the goal of all critique. Perhaps the temptation is better labeled as theologizing rather than as moralizing. The construction of a modern-secular-colonial axis of evil motivates a turn toward some source of salvation. Sometimes, triumphalist Christianity reasserts itself in its traditional position as salvific discourse – at other times, it is a triumphalist Hinduism, Islam, or Buddhism.

The insights of postcolonial and postsecular theory attempt to inoculate us against such temptations. Just as the colonial is not defined simply by political rule and not simply confined to the years a certain flag was raised, the secular and the modern, too, can be understood as linked cultural, economic, and political programs that appear in different guises in different places at different times. There can be many modernities and many secular ages. Yet the modern, the secular, and the colonial each name distinctive, linked regimes. They are linked by a shared epistemology and a shared sense of what counts as knowledge, and they apply power to that knowledge, changing the world to fit the way it is perceived. Any characterization of this epistemic regime here will be too quick, for it is not simply rationalism or scientism or subject-centrism that characterizes it but also the reactions that such commitments produce and that are caught up in its centripetal force: romanticism, pragmatism, spiritualism, the discourse of “religion,” and the like. This epistemic field is articulated differently as it treats different objects: the religious and the secular, the past and the present, our people and other peoples.

Reading the postcolonial together with the postsecular also clarifies the sense of struggle (or, in more secular, modern, colonial terms, critique, see Asad, 2009) that the emerging field of postsecular studies often leaves latent. The anticolonial impetus of the postcolonial is obvious, but the antisecular impetus of the postsecular appears ambiguous. At first it would seem as though the issue is simply that colonialism is so clearly evil: it has taken the lives of millions, and it continues to impoverish billions. There are not secular armies filling mass graves. But there are. How better to characterize the “global war on terror” waged by the United States and its allies than as a secular war: a war that aims to manage religion and to exclude religion that cannot be managed, that does not submit to the secular regime? Just as postcolonial studies were motivated by a desire to theorize and support anticolonial struggles, postsecular studies are motivated by just as raw a reaction to contemporary evil. Understanding the postcolonial and the postsecular together allows us to see that these two struggles are in fact one, that the violence done by colonialism and secularism, the violence that characterizes the underside of modernity, has shared sources and so may call for similar responses. More importantly, it allows us to envision a shared tradition of struggle – both on the ground and in complementary academic work. Put another way, we do not need to think of religion as the answer to the question of the postsecular just as we do not need to think of indigeneity as the answer to the question of the postcolonial. The questions of the postcolonial and the postsecular are posed by the massive violence and injustice of the present, and the proper response is not an answer as much as participation in the struggle against that violence and that injustice.

What happens when modernity, secularism, and colonialism are not linked? Scholarly inquiry goes off course, sometimes reproducing rather than critically interrogating the status quo. When modernity and colonialism are linked, but not secularism, religion is taken to be a natural object when in fact the religion portrayed is often a projection of Western interests and fantasies. Religious studies scholars have vigorously challenged the discourse on “world religions” so intimately tied too modernity and colonialism (Masuzawa, 2005), yet this discourse is still invoked by some scholars of colonialism and modernity (e.g., Joas and Wigandt, 2009). The elision of secularism is a particular shortcoming of the political science literature as scholars have grappled with the “problem” of religious violence. Mark Juergensmeyer (2007) uncritically contrasts Western secular nation-states with religious nation-states of the global South. Linell Cady and Sheldon Simon (2007) argue that the use of religious symbols, practices, and traditions for the legitimization of political violence reflects an opting out of a Western paradigm of political and legal legitimacy. In the West, they write, this “legitimacy is primarily secular, rational, and pragmatic” (2007: 4). In contrast, they claim, religious militants reject secular models of legitimizing the nation and the concomitant privatizing of religion. According to them, complex histories prompted this disillusionment with the secular state in the developing world, where we find stunted economic growth, limited political engagement, and corrupt governments, together with a growing population with higher educational achievements. “Religions provide a culturally powerful alternative tradition from which to challenge the secular state,” they conclude (2007: 17). Note how such analysis invokes the secular but not secularism. For such scholars, the secular is simply the result of secularization, a natural process that accompanies modernity. An analysis of secularism, in tandem with modernity and colonialism, underscores the distortions, and political potential, of religion caused by modernity and colonialism.

However, this is not always the case. Even when secularism is the object of inquiry or debate, often overlooked is the way secularism not only manages religion but also distorts religion – more precisely and dramatically, secularism constitutes religion. In the promisingly titled Comparative Secularism in a Global Age, Linell Cady and Elizabeth Hurd (2010) acknowledge that religion is a product of modern processes of secularization. Yet, throughout they use “religion” as if it was a trans-historical phenomenon ready to be remade or utilized in the unfolding of modernity. Sabnum Tejani (2008) explores debates over secularism in India and finds that, while participants are cognizant of the consequences of modernity and colonialism, they often treat religion uncritically. They imagine that religion is only excluded, not managed, by colonialism and modernity. She sorts these debates into four strands. First, some defenders of secularism endorse it as part of a modernization of Indian society or as part of an Indian heritage of celebrating the compatibility of religious truths. Second, some detractors of secularism see modernization and secularization going hand in hand and see both as an “imperialism of categories,” to use Ashis Nandy’s term. Third, Tejani notes that proponents of Hindu nationalism submerge cultural–political differences into a shared Hindu civilization. A truly Indian political practice of secularism and religion is necessary for a truly Indian modernity. Fourth, some Indian political philosophers hope to translate the spiritual and ethical elements of all religions into a “secular, non-doctrinal framework for behavior” (Tejani, 2008: 10). In each case, religion is taken as an object pre-given or as an object that can be manufactured in a sort of scholarly alchemy.

However, the work of Cady, Hurd, and Tejani is helpful in reminding us that secularism is located in a particular political context, with particular history – that there are secularisms. Tejani explores the specificity of the Indian context in which debates about secularism on the subcontinent emerge. Hurd (2008) distinguishes between laicism and Judeo-Christian secularism. The latter (found in the United States and Germany) sees the secular order reflect specifically Christian (or later Judeo-Christian) convictions while the former (found in France) rejects connections with specifically Jewish and Christian values. Such research is moving in the right direction, thinking through the dynamics and afterlives of colonialism in a specific place and time which result in the specific ways religion is excluded, managed, or constituted in that context.

The linkage of the postcolonial and the postsecular that we propose, bringing together colonialism, modernity, and secularism, has been vigorously opposed by both many scholars of the postcolonial and some scholars of the postsecular. The objections these scholars raise are not particularly novel, and the best way to address them is to demonstrate how compelling a robust examination of the religious, or the colonial, can be. Such studies would show the secular, the colonial, and the modern entwined in a specific place, at a specific time. But before turning to the articles that follow, that do just this work, let us survey these objections, and possible responses. Postcolonial scholars have recently launched a forceful attack on studies of the postsecular, with a recent issue of the journal Boundary 2, “Antinomies of the Postsecular,” devoted to debunking the novelty and critical potency of postsecular studies (Mufti 2013). The objections fall into two categories: economic and humanist. The former worry not so much that religion is an opiate or superstructural but that the most dramatic injustices in the world, and particularly in the postcolonial world, happen to poor people. Religion and other elements of culture may hold scholarly interest, but compared to, say, the global economic crisis and corporate excess, they simply are not foundational. Moreover, the modern, the colonial, and the secular all supervene on the economic. It was the shift from an agricultural to a merchant economy that fueled colonialism and the epistemic shifts of modernity, and that required religion to take a form that could be easily managed. To this objection, we respond that the separation of the economic from other spheres of the social is a peculiarly modern (and secular!) phenomenon. When the privileged perspective asserted by modernity is set aside, the linkages between the economic, the political, the theological, and the cultural appear in their full complexity (e.g., we should not neglect the theological ideas that contributed to the Great Recession, such as the concept of debt). Moreover, we are not interested in telling a causal story about epistemic shifts; we are interested in describing epistemic regimes. We remain agnostic on the question of whether, causally, the economic is a privileged domain.

The second objection from postcolonial scholars is that the project of postcolonial studies, and particularly subaltern studies, has been fundamentally humanist. It has been about restoring humanity to those whose humanity has been denied, to those whose stories are not in the history books. Postsecular scholarship that has investigated the postcolonial world has a tendency to appeal to religion as an antidote to the secular-colonial-modern (most notably in the work of Saba Mahmood). The postcolonial scholar objects that the antagonist of this narrative is right, but the protagonist is wrong. Subaltern subjects are treated merely as a representative of a movement that opposes colonialism, a religious movement. Subaltern subjects themselves may inhabit religious norms in this or that way, but their story is essentially determined by the story of that which they inhabit – for instance, the Islam that offers a counterbalance to Western interests. Moreover, since religion (usually Islam) is the protagonist of this story, it goes unquestioned, with no space left to critique its less humane aspects (that would be pro-American, pro-colonial, pro-secular). We would respond that this objection is plausible because the examples it cites do not engage fully with religion – with its values, traditions, ethics, forms of imagining, and, most importantly, with its connections to the cultural, economic, and political. Doing so deepens our sense of subaltern humanity, of the complexity of lives that are religious but are not reducible to religion.

There has been less opposition and more avoidance of postcolonial studies from the postsecular studies camp. Some of this avoidance brings with it a usually implicit, sometimes explicit, critique. Modernity and Christianity are deeply linked, they charge, and that linkage has its origins in European history (in addition to Taylor, 2007, see Anidjar, 2006; Milbank, 1993; Pickstock, 1998). Modernity starts when Christianity goes wrong (whether under Constantine, during the late Middle Ages, or in the early modern period). Many bad consequences follow from this Christian heresy that is modernity: secularism (the heresy pushed to an extreme), colonialism, perhaps sexism and racism. What is needed, from this perspective, is to address the European Christian heresy, not to address its consequences downstream. Focusing the energy of struggle on postcolonial studies has little chance of success if the fortress of European Christian confusion remains untouched. We respond to this objection by arguing that the most explicit, dramatic, and grotesque aspects of European modernity are evident at its periphery. The Holocaust was no surprise to those colonial subjects who had seen the genocidal capacities of European Christians. Studying center and periphery together illuminate the logics animating both.

The second objection implicitly offered by scholars of the postsecular is that the language of colonialism is passé (e.g., Keller et al., 2004). We are in an age of empire – particularly, American empire. Just as Constantine aligned the Roman Empire with Christianity, American civic religion aligns this empire similarly. Colonialism was about controlling territory, about sovereignty; empire is still about power and control but is deterritorialized, complementing the borderless flows of capital (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Empire relies on perverted religious logic, perhaps secularized religious logic, including freedom from difference, an absent but all too present sovereign, and self-discipline. Empire is all about managing difference, including managing religious difference; it goes hand in hand with secularism. Postsecular critique is, then, critique of empire: critique that counter-narrates the universal and the particular, the local and the global – all themes conveniently central to the Christian story (viz. the Eucharist) (Cavanaugh, 2002). We respond to this objection by noting that what empire elides is local histories, stories of specific people and places (that these are instrumentalized in much Christian theology should also be noted). Postcolonial studies recovers these local histories and so refuses the self-understanding of empire, emphasizing the specific, contingent, and violent processes by which empire is born and sustained. Religion is entangled in these processes, and religion can motivate struggle against them.

How might Christian theologians, who clearly have a significant stake in the matter, respond to the linkage we propose between modernity, colonialism, and secularism? In a sense, the field of postcolonial theology has a decisively affirmative response to the question “Is the postcolonial postsecular?” (e.g., Kwok, 2005; West, 2008). But it is quite a different sort of response than that offered by the articles here, for the theological spirit is restorative and synthetic while the spirit of these articles is critical and analytic – not to mention that the articles here do not take Christian theological categories as givens. From the theological left, postcolonial theologians are often suspicious of theory, instead seeking to privilege the (religious) voices of the global South, finding implicit in these voices a condemnation of modernity, secularism, and colonialism. On this view, the theological frame holds up alternative visions of how the world could be, using those alternative visions to motivate action – to motivate struggle. Indeed, much liberation theology could be read as postcolonial theology, interrogating the complicity of Christian ideas with modernity and colonialism, though the tradition of liberation theology rarely thematizes secularism as a problem. From the theological right, the challenge of the postcolonial calls for a deeper reflection on “inculturation,” the translation of the Christian theological message for local contexts. While critics on the theological left often dismiss such concerns of missionaries and those reflecting on missionary work, the early days of Pope Francis suggest that a more traditionalist Catholic theological project may include within it vigorous critiques of colonialism and modernity (cf., Katongole, 2011).

We believe that Christian theologians, and others whose reflections are situated within a religious tradition, can learn much for the sorts of inquiries into the postcolonial and the postsecular found in the articles that follow. If religion in tandem with the conceptual politics of the secular serve as a discursive field in which claims to modernity and political power are contested, then religion cannot simply function as an unproblematic resource to dream otherwise. Rather, we need to reflect on the impact of the discourse of religion on the practices of theologizing, whether this is in the mode of revivalisms or postcolonial theologies.